#deaf-history

#deaf-history

He was just rage. He looked like a monster. His behaviour was just wrong. She just fell. I went to help her but he screamed at me to get in the car. Witness Paige Allen described the brutal assault, capturing the severity and callousness of Owusu's actions as he attacked Mukhtar and prevented others from assisting her.

The design of classrooms, childcare facilities, community centers, and public spaces directly shapes how sound is perceived, how communication unfolds, and how inclusion is experienced. Acoustics, spatial configuration, lighting strategies, and material choices can either reinforce barriers to participation or foster environments that support diverse auditory experiences.

I didn't want to get hearing devices because, to me, there was a horrible stigma. People who wore hearing aids were doddering. They didn't listen, they said, 'what, what,' over and over. Worse, the hearing aid would make this squealing sound. I worried that it was the beginning of the end of me.

The neural networks that process written and oral language are deeply intertwined and largely overlap when reading print books or listening to audiobooks. There isn't much of a difference between the brain network for reading and the brain network for language comprehension. The brain area we call the 'letter box,' which processes print, is not as engaged when you listen, but it has been shown that when some people listen to words, they visualize them, so the letter box gets activated as well.

He then lowered his fists, extended his thumbs and little fingers, and moved them up and down by his chest, as though milking a cow. Finally, he laid the fingers of one hand flat on his chin and flexed his wrist forward. Hartwell, who has no hearing problems, had just used BSL, British Sign Language, to order his morning latte with normal milk at the deaf-run Dialogue Cafe, based at the University of East London.

We've been waiting to get a show of our own for such a long time, says Heroda Berhane, one half of the deaf identical twin presenting duo, Hermon and Heroda. People have never seen our culture, our identity, the way we discuss the things. So it's a dating show, yes, but it's not just about dating; it's also revealing our identity and our culture, and that has never been seen before.

When I was growing up, people liked to join. People joined churches or clubs or dance groups or singing groups. Those still exist, but their membership has quite declined. People just don't want to join anymore. It's certainly down from the '50s and '60s. And before, if you got on the bus you could say hello to everyone. Now, if you did that, they'd rush you off to the looney bin. It's a sad state of affairs.

It's rare for interpreters' cultural background to reflect the music itself, says AV Vilavong, a Deaf concert interpreter who performs at major music festivals across the country. "The fact that Celimar is Puerto Rican, there are cultural nuances that are already embedded in how she, as a Deaf interpreter, will match the tone, the cultural aspects, the songs, the significance behind the slang for particular vocabulary," Vilavong says through an interpeter. "It's embedded in who she is as an individual."

N AOMI HAD ALWAYS hated school, so much so that she cried for hours when school breaks ended. She hadn't always considered herself disabled, though. Sure, she'd felt lucky to have discovered her autism and learning disabilities relatively early-and to have started getting accommodations in junior high-given that most autistic women aren't diagnosed until adulthood, if at all. But until her second semester of university, Naomi hadn't realized how much autism impacted her life. Then, just before semester's end, COVID-19 crashed in.

Next week, the government is expected to announce its education white paper. It is a moment, as political correspondent Alexandra Topping explains, of high political peril. Part of the proposals will be reforms to special educational needs provision in England. And while nearly all agree that the current system is broken extremely expensive, very divisive, and failing the most vulnerable children the mood around the announcements is still tense.

Developmental disabilities are actually quite common. In the United States, about 1 in 6 children has a developmental disability (CDC, 2024). Intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are a group of neurodevelopmental conditions usually present at birth that affect the trajectory of a person's physical, intellectual, and/or emotional development (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2021). Conditions such as Down Syndrome, Autism, Fragile X, Cerebral Palsy, and others are examples of intellectual or developmental disabilities.

At first, Michelle Tetschner thought the person on the other end of the phone was joking. It was 2023, and the call came from the University of North Florida, where her son Raymond, who has Down syndrome, was enrolled in a life-skills day program. The woman on the line sounded alarmingly serious. Raymond was being suspended, and Tetschner was told she needed to come pick him up immediately.

When I take a walk in my neighborhood, my white hair, dark glasses, and white cane shout to the world that I am an older blind man. Some passers-by assume that I am lost and ask if I need help. It is true that blind people sometimes need help when using a mobility aid (a white cane or guide dog) to navigate their physical environment. However, once a person becomes proficient at traveling with a mobility aid, they typically need much less help.