For deaf, wireless devices offer new portal to world

Associated Press

TALLADEGA, Ala.

Quietly over the last decade, phones that make text messaging easy have changed life profoundly for millions of deaf people.

Gone are the days of a deaf person’s driving to someone’s house to see if they are home. Wives text their deaf husbands in the basement, just as a hearing wife might yell down the stairs. Deaf teens blend in with the crowd since they’re constantly texting, like everyone else.

Visit the Alabama School for the Deaf, and it’s impossible to miss the signs of a revolution that many hearing people simply never noticed. Most everyone at the school in Talladega has at least one handheld texting device, and some have two.

For the first time, a generation of deaf people can communicate with the world on its terms, using cell phones, BlackBerrys or iPhones, of which some 260 million are in use in the United States.

Matt Kochie, who is deaf, has been texting his entire adult life and has a hard time imagining a day without it.

“We’d have to go back to pen and paper,” said Kochie, 29, a teacher.

Kochie used sign language and interpreters during interviews, and deaf people still generally favor signing when talking face-to-face. It’s faster and more expressive than pecking out letters on a tiny keyboard.

For generations, deaf people communicated mainly by sign language, gesturing, lip-reading and writing. Telephone lines then allowed for TTY machines that deaf people could use to send printed messages electronically.

Machines linked to land-lines are still used, as are services involving operators who interpret for the deaf during phone conversations, plus e-mail and video phone calls. But advocates for the deaf say life began changing rapidly after 1999, when the first BlackBerry was introduced by Canadian manufacturer Research in Motion.

Further advances in technology could make communication even easier. Many deaf people are eager to see if the video chat software on the new iPhone 4 works well for sign-language communication, said Daphne Keith, at a Verizon store near the Alabama School for the Deaf. Similarly, an engineering team at the University of Washington is working on a device to transmit American Sign Language video over cell networks.