amanuenses

While most futures are difficult to see, shrouded as they are beneath the fog of contingency, mine is doubly difficult to visualize. The crystal ball remains clouded over.

Language is the most important feature in the formation of a community, and sign language is no exception. In the US, the signing community is as linguistically and culturally rich as any other language community.

in 1947, engineers at RCA, working on a more advanced version of the Optophone, developed a technology that didn’t just indicate the shape of the letters, but could actually identify them—creating what (Mills writes) is “today widely considered to be the first successful example of optical character recognition (OCR).” This development paved the

designing for the narrow case of disability benefits everyone.

1. Seeing Stars There are as many ways of being blind as there are of being tall, or sick, or hot. But the popular view has always conceived of blindness as a totality.

The life of a blind (or, really, any disabled) person can, in the most cynical view, also resemble one long troubleshooting session, punctuated by occasional moments of smooth operation. There’s just so much trouble to shoot when you’re blind.

I regard people who cry at paintings a bit like I regard people who cry at the symphony: I don’t doubt their emotion, but it seems wild to me that something so formal could create such feeling. I’ve always looked at art with a cooler eye, as something that was interesting to talk and think about, but that rarely evoked visceral emotions.

Many Deaf people say they’d prefer to be Deaf than hearing, and intentionally find partners with the same genetic cause of deafness to ensure that their children are Deaf, too, celebrating the large Deaf family trees they’re a part of and the linguistic and cultural community and traditions they pass on.