March 15 - April 15 is Deaf History Month!
My grandma and great uncle were born hard of hearing / deaf and sent off to state institutions at a young age. My grandma will say she learned a lot of important skills there, but missed out on having a loving family due to the ignorance around hearing impairment at the time.
Luckily, we've come a long way since then as far as awareness and information goes.
Props to all the hearing impaired members here
For others - anyone can learn to sign! Just like spoken languages, sign languages differ sometimes from country to country, but here is a great site for ASL :
http://www.signlanguage101.com/
This was also helpful to keep in mind when interacting with those that lip-read
My grandma and great uncle were born hard of hearing / deaf and sent off to state institutions at a young age. My grandma will say she learned a lot of important skills there, but missed out on having a loving family due to the ignorance around hearing impairment at the time.
Luckily, we've come a long way since then as far as awareness and information goes.
Props to all the hearing impaired members here
For others - anyone can learn to sign! Just like spoken languages, sign languages differ sometimes from country to country, but here is a great site for ASL :
http://www.signlanguage101.com/
This was also helpful to keep in mind when interacting with those that lip-read
