While equality means different things to different individuals, common themes appear among our opinions about the topic.
These include access, opportunities and discrimination:
Equality to a deaf person means being able to access the same opportunities available to their hearing peers without discrimination.
Not only are there accessibility laws for deaf people in the physical world, such as the right to request CART and interpreters and other reasonable accommodations, deaf people have the right to digital accessibility.
You would think digital accessibility would be easy for companies to accommodate, right?
True, but many don’t. Instead, they make excuses so they don’t have to change what they’re doing.
This is a topic I’ve always wanted to talk about, but few people hardly address it.
Deaf people often struggle with social challenges, emotional detachment and isolation. In the worst cases, the lack of connection may lead to a dark path of addiction, bad habits and depression.
Some classic examples involve social relationships, theater, and sports -- especially those that require focused teamwork.
This begs the question: what can we do to get deaf people involved more fully, increasing our quality of life and lessening feelings of isolation?
How often do we see deaf people in the media today?
Pretty seldom, isn’t it?
And when we do see deaf people represented in the media, does the media accurately display who the deaf individuals are and their views -- just like anyone else?
That is, without using patronizing terms like “overcoming” and “inspiring” or without negative terms such as “afflicted with” and “suffering from”, etc?
The perception that hearing aids fix deafness as glasses fix nearsightedness still lingers to this day in 2017. While fitting a pair of prescription glasses on a person with worse than 20/20 eyesight is relatively simple, this is not the case with hearing aids.
A person with impaired eyesight can simply get a prescription to correct vision impairments, whether by using glasses or contacts. Many people, both deaf and hearing, correct their vision in this way.
