Bridging the Gap Between the Hearing & Deaf Worlds
Even though it’s not visible (like many things related to deaf awareness), audism is a major within society and it remains a major issue for anyone who is experiencing some kind of deafness. Yet it’s rarely ever talked about compared other discriminations and prejudices.
So what is audism and what should be aware?
Unless there are hearing aids or cochlear implants in your line of vision, or perhaps sign language are the main form of communication, it’s safe to say it’s not immediately obvious if a person is deaf or not. But is that good or bad?
Learn about my thoughts on deafness being an invisible disability
For some people, the concept of asking whether being deaf is a disability is weird question to ask or it’s complicated. For others, it’s very straightforward.
It will really depends on how you want to look at it. But in this episode, I talk about it from MY own perspectives rather than treat it as a one answer that suits everyone.
I have decided to accept a challenge to sign more on my YouTube channel by publicly sharing my sign language journey.
As much as I love languages, I have mentioned previously about how I’m never learning oral languages again. But I’ve still got some stories to share about my experiences of learning them, like the one time I was learning French in high school.
Even though I managed to get through, it wasn’t without its unique challenges that comes with listening to other people speaking in French. And that became a problem during exam times.
As someone who loves languages and has learn to speak a few in various fluency levels, I have decided that I am never going to learn oral languages again. This is primarily because of the challenges of learning them as a deaf person.
It’s a huge shame that I fully agree with the concept of learning languages to everyone as it has opened my mind to many parts of the world, people and culture.
When having a conversation with another person, there are certain cues, clues and non-verbal communication methods that I watch out for to allow me to understand what’s going on better.
Even though there are many non-verbal communication methods that a deaf or hard of hearing person tends to use, I’d like to use this opportunity to tell you what I (subtly) look out for throughout a conversation with another person.
Virtual events like group meetings, webinars and online conferences have been around for a long time. But now that they are becoming even more popular (thanks to the pandemic), it made me realise how frustrating it is that they are not deaf accessible.
If you are an event organiser or you know someone who is one, and you’ve been thinking or running online events, you might not be aware how you are excluding attendees who are deaf from taking part but would like to take part.
I’ve been having such a hard time on working out the definition of “deaf” because of its complexity and the number of sub-categories or labels it has under it.
One of the biggest reason for my confusion is because of how it can (and has) caused rifts, segregation and even abuse within the communities, which is not something that I would ever encourage. So I wanted to share my personal thoughts on the definition of “deaf”.
