Written English Version:

During this holiday season, many people take the time to reconnect with their family. This is true with deaf people, too.

Yet for a large number of deaf people, their families are hearing. The majority of interaction is likely to be spoken, and the deaf individual is unavoidably left out of them. This situation is certainly true for me.

This situation is not to be pitied, but simply is. What this highlights to me is not the barriers inherent here, but the importance in getting through and overcoming them. How communication is utterly important in maintaining the most personal of bonds. And how these ties persist even in spite of such barriers.

When one looks through the lens of journalism, you can see this example writ large. Instead of family, you look at society. In this sense, Journalism is an act of communication that cuts through the barriers of society, and highlights the importance of the bonds we share in common.

Within Idealab, people are exploring upon new potentials and dimensions of the journalistic field. But for the holidays, take a moment to stop and consider those close to you. Your efforts mean as much to society as the words you give your loved ones. It is a gift, and an important one.

Have a happy holidays.

With any technology or system, there are built-in usability assumptions, including those that are taken for granted so much that they are not even acknowledged. For deaf people, most digital technology remains accessible to them as sound is rarely used as a primary interface element. Yet they still have issues with technology. This harkens back to one often unacknowledged element for access - language.

Computer users require both conversational literacy and technology literacy. Without such, the mere use of a computer is confusing and daunting. While modern computers do have an astonishing number of language modes, not all languages are covered. Nor does this help when the text is on an un-translated website.

Thus those who use English as a second language, the barrier is in attempting to grasp first the language, then the technological meaning behind the language, and then finally the technology itself. All that needs to be done before even attempting to peruse and comprehend information presented in a secondary language.

For such secondary language users, one good solution is as simple as providing them with information in their own primary language. This does not only provide the benefit of increasing comprehension, but the simple fact that it exists removes the perceived barrier. Using a person's primary language also increases comfort and sense of connection towards the material. This is especially true when considering languages that are poorly served otherwise. The lack of primary language material often increases its personal importance to the user.

Deaf people can be considered part of this group of secondary language users, but their inclusion is oddly expressed. Most Deaf Americans have grown up with exposure to English, but this is a limited exposure. By definition an auditory system is restrictive towards those who do not have full access to it. And written English does not provide the same level of exposure to the language as the constant conversational interactions expressed in speech. This, combined with educational system that was historically poor in confronting their language barriers, has kept a significant percentage of Deaf people using English as an incompletely understood secondary language.

The same solution of providing primary language use should also work for Deaf people. Yet there is an additional problem in that the primary language of American Sign Language has no written equivalent. It is solely a visual language, which means providing communication in this language requires video. A task that is more complex than providing alternative language access within the same medium of writing. This is the challenge I wish to confront. Can it truly be possible to provide the same level of participation and access that citizen journalism entails within the medium of video? Even more critically, can this access be provided when there already exist barriers to using these tools?

Lets focus on the Deaf community as an example of this situation. The number of totally deaf people is on the order of less then 0.1 percent of the United States population. This number by far is much too little to make any real impact on society at large, and usually means that even a even a large city has a comparatively small and scattered deaf community.

While a specific geographic Deaf community is small, the whole population of the deaf is still sizable. But this group can only create a real impact if it works together. This is where the advantage of the Internet comes in. There has been much made of the ability of the Internet to allow niche groups to form communities and groups of their own online, free of the geographic limitations their small niche entails.

But let's be clear here. Most of these groups are 'communities of interest.' While such groups may or may not be important, I am working under a little more stringent definition of community. For our purposes, the intent is to define a group that has needs to be provided additional or just different information in order to fully participate in society.

Thus the test becomes - Does this group have a definition of self and needs that differ from society at large? A community should have its own cultural identity that defines the whole of the person. (For example - being a Star Trek fan would not really define the whole person, but being a minority language user would likely have that impact.) And it should also have a set of needs that reflect segregation from society.

Deaf people can't fully access spoken languages, so they created a common bond through the use of a visual language. We still need to participate and interact with the rest of society, but our numbers are too small to advocate this on a local basis. Thus providing Internet tools for our information needs on a national basis becomes a prerequisite for gaining these tools on a local level. That's the only way I can see that works.

The current problem of massive layoffs in the newspaper industry is a repeat of a similar issue over twenty years ago. But this time, the outrage is louder since it is affecting journalists themselves, and not the press operators. The last time, increased press automation and computer layout tools starting in the late 70's rendered the jobs of many press operators obsolete. Deaf people no longer work in the news industry in any real numbers. This crisis also affected their publication activities. Most Deaf newspapers have long since folded. Silent News managed to limp along until 2001.

The traditional separation of reporters from society could not be more starkly illustrated in the gap between these two classes in the newsroom and the pressroom. Reporters were highly educated, socially connected and 'elite'. In contrast, the working-class pressroom was largely staffed by a group of non-speaking Deaf who were given the very un-politically correct term 'dumb'. Such disparagement reveals both their lack of standing in society, and the gap between the two groups.

Despite this label, the press operators worked hard as the backbone of the news industry and attempted to apply their news knowledge to their own community. This division can be seen as a stark model of how isolated the journalism industry was to the community at large. For despite being one of the groups closest to the newsroom, Deaf people never really gained the full benefits of that knowledge.

Rebooting the connection

With Internet media, the activity of psychical publishing is no longer required. So the Deaf are now pretty much starting from scratch, trying to gain a foothold in this world despite being part of the so-called 'digital divide'. Groups that have been marginalized before now have opportunities to share in the creation of news as never before. Yet we still face new and different challenges in eliminating barriers.

A similar attempt to provide barrier-eliminating opportunities, but on a global scale, can be seen in the Rising Voices project. I am looking at many similar issues as the ones David Sasaki noted in his excellent post Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation. The aims and points are similar but instead of looking at the level of exclusion on a global scale, I am looking at exclusion that is happening even in the 'first world'. How do we aim to include a marginalized group like the Deaf?

The answers to this are primarily similar to most marginalized groups. The overall methods that Rising Voices uses will be useful even in the 'first world'. But each type of group is different and has different needs. Deaf people are just a little more unusual than most.

What divides Deaf people from the rest of society is of course communication and language. The Deaf have two distinct issues related to communication that are different from other linguistic groups. Many linguistic groups in the United States do have publications in their own language. This provides a level of comfort and unity for these groups. But even so they eventually learn English and are assimilated into the majority English-speaking society. But Deaf people don't hear the language. This barrier prevents assimilation, and prevents many from feeling completely comfortable using spoken and written English. Its important to note that written English is still a subset of a spoken language, so the barrier still exists even when printed. This means the use of their primary language becomes even more important as a tool to communicate. But their primary language, American Sign Language, is a visual language with no written equivalent.

This raises a number of issues. Considering that the primary method of Internet communication is through writing, many of the basic publication tools become unacceptable to use. The rise of Internet video is now presenting the perfect opportunity for sign language communication. A large part of what I wish to do is to look at how to effectively use such video for this purpose. How do you effectively create such video in a grassroots manner as the sole basis of community news? Thats not a quick thing to answer, so I'll be exploring more of that in future posts.