We recently reported on the effective use of T-Mobile USA Inc.’s Sidekick and Research In Motion Ltd.’s Blackberry devices by Gallaudet University deaf students in a successful protest that derailed Jane K. Fernandes from becoming the next president of the educational institution.
Gallaudet students, among other things, believed Fernandes was the wrong person for the job. Fernandes, born deaf, seemingly wasn’t regarded as one of them, seeing that she grew up learning to speak and lip-read. She didn’t learn sign language until her early 20s. So students used an icon of modernity-a wireless communications device-to vent their anger. They won.
The Washington Post, in an Oct. 31 editorial, was not impressed. The paper said what really triumphed “was lawlessness and the principle that a university president should be chosen on the basis of popularity. … Ms. Fernandes promoted a school that would welcome all sorts of deaf and hard-of-hearing people; that would accommodate itself to improving technologies, which in coming years will allow more and more deaf people to function in the hearing world; and that would emphasize tolerance of diversity.” Is there an irony somewhere in all this?
It makes me wonder how hard-of-hearing individuals are responding to government and industry efforts to make mobile phones hearing-aid compatible, given the apparent cultural differences within the deaf and hearing-impaired communities. And visa versa. The Federal Communications Commission is soliciting public comment next month and in early January for a report on the state of digital mobile phone hearing-aid compatibility. The agency, among other things, requires cellular operators of ensure that half of their handset models for each air interface comply with a 2003-approved interference standard by Feb. 18, 2008. The FCC staff report will consider whether to do more, less or nothing on HAC implementation. There is a lot at stake.
Wireless technologies can offer deaf and hard-of-hearing citizens the same empowering capabilities they provide those of us lucky enough to have healthy hearing.
In her new book, A New Civil Right: Telecommunications Equality for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans, Karen Peltz Strauss says telecom access is far more than what has been regarded by some in the past as a social service or a charitable cause justifying societal compassion. “It is a movement whose passion and momentum often accomplished what everyone seemed to say was impossible,” writes Strauss, a former FCC official. “It is a movement for self-determination, one that consistently rejected the paternalistic attempts of telephone companies and federal regulators to make decisions about what was best for people who cannot hear. And it is a movement that continues to this day, in an ongoing struggle to ensure new advances in telecommunications technologies do not eliminate gains spanning nearly 40 years of advocacy. Throughout it all, advocates have shown the persistence and determination to follow each battle through to its successful outcome.”
Jane K. Fernandes believed she was part of that movement.
