Advocacy and the OHL Community - Part 2
This is my keynote address for the SayWhatClub 2007 National
Convention. It was a wonderful convention. Our
full coverage begins here.
This is part two of four parts.
Part One
Part Three
Part Four
~~~~~
So as I started thinking about what to talk about tonight, I realized
that there's a natural connection between the SayWhatClub conference in
2000, and this one. And it seemed like a reasonable idea to look at how
the hearing loss world has progressed in the last seven years. As I
said, our local Deaf agency in San Diego has made little progress
in terms of expanding services to include all people with hearing loss.
Fortunately some agencies have done a better job of it. But we still
have a long way to go in our efforts to obtain social justice for hard
of hearing and late-deafened folks. So tonight I'd like to talk about
how the hearing loss world is evolving, and particularly about advocacy
for the OHL community.
OHL??? What's that?
I came up with that term a few years ago to indicate people with
hearing loss who prefer oral communications to sign language. The
acronym stands for "oral people with hearing loss". This
includes the overwhelming majority of those who are normally considered
hard of hearing, late-deafened, and oral deaf. I had two reasons for
creating yet another term to refer to people with hearing loss.
One reason is because I got tired of saying "hard of hearing,
late-deafened, and oral deaf". And even that leaves out people who
refer to themselves as hearing impaired, hearing challenged, and so
forth. And those are not really very precise terms, as we'll see. The
term "OHL" provides a concise and accurate way to refer to
everyone with hearing loss who prefers oral communications. This
provides a very natural distinction with other members of the hearing
loss community, those who prefer sign language. And I believe that
identification based on communications preference is much more
significant than identification based on degree of hearing loss, or when
a person lost his hearing.
Another reason for coming up with the term "OHL" is because
of all the confusion surrounding the traditional vocabulary, and
especially the term "hard of hearing". The real issue with
that term is that it has both an audiological meaning and a social
meaning. Audiologically it means someone whose hearing loss is not as
severe as the hearing loss of a person who is considered audiologically
deaf. I've seen various levels of hearing loss identified as the
dividing point between hard of hearing and deaf; 90 decibels seems to be
the most generally accepted.
But the term 'hard of hearing' is also used to indicate someone who
prefers to remain in the hearing world and communicate orally, rather
than join the culturally Deaf world and communicate manually. And this
social identification is independent of the amount of hearing loss a
person has. Indeed, many people who are audiologically deaf consider
themselves to be hard of hearing, and visa versa. Many people who are
culturally Deaf have much more hearing than many who consider themselves
hard of hearing.
So these traditional labels really tell us nothing about how a person
functions socially, culturally, or linguistically. The really
significant distinction is a person's language preference, and that
preference is hidden by the traditional vocabulary.
So when I use the term "OHL", I am referring to anyone and
everyone with hearing loss who prefers spoken language as their primary
means of communication. And when I use the phrase "culturally
Deaf", or just the word "Deaf", I mean those who prefer
sign language.
The members of the OHL community have historically had very limited
services available to them. I mentioned that, in the late 90s, before I
started Hearing Loss Web, I was looking for resources on the Internet
for late deafened people, and there were virtually none. But there was
all kinds of stuff for culturally Deaf people. And I think the disparity
in service availability for OHL folks as compared to Deaf folks has
increased substantially since the late 90s!
So how did it come to be like this? There are about 50 OHL people for
every Deaf person. How is it, then, that Deaf people got so many
services to help them deal with their hearing loss, but OHL people got
virtually none?
The short answer is that people in the Deaf community have been
working very hard for a very long time to get the services and
accommodations that they enjoy today. The National Association of the
Deaf was established in 1880 to advocate for Deaf needs, and they have
done an outstanding job!
And they have been advocating for services to meet their needs for
the last 127 years.
We have television captioning today because of the advocacy efforts
of the Deaf community.
We have movie captioning today because of the advocacy efforts of the
Deaf community.
We have relay services today because of the advocacy efforts of the
Deaf community.
For many years many Deaf people and many OHL people were unable to
use the telephone, because they couldn't hear well enough. Then in 1964,
two Deaf men named Robert Weitbrecht and James Marsters invented an
acoustic coupler that allowed teletype machines to communicate over
standard telephone lines. And the first TTY was born! And soon Deaf
people were locating and refurbishing old and discarded teletype
machines, and a Deaf telephone network was created. Not too long after
that, an organization called Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc.
started publishing the Blue Book, which contained TTY phone numbers for
the entire United States.
And that's another example of how Deaf leaders, in response to a
problem the community faced, took it upon themselves to solve their
problem. So today Deaf Americans have access to a broad range of
services and accommodations that provide access to mainstream American
life. Public and private organizations generally recognize their
obligation to provide communications access to Deaf people, and
interpreters have become commonplace in schools, churches, courts,
medical settings, and throughout the fabric of our society.
Organizations that refuse to comply may quickly find themselves subject
to a lawsuit brought by one of several Deaf advocacy organizations.
Part One
Part Three
Part Four
