Word: asl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...blind person or, for that matter, the average American? The answer, say deaf activists, is that their peers do not read English. The first language of more than half of America's deaf, whose number is variously estimated at between 250,000 and 2 million, is American Sign Language (ASL). That elegant mode of communication, a combination of signs and gestures, is not based on English. Thus the English reading level of the average deaf adult at the completion of formal education is usually placed somewhere between the third and the eighth grade. Says New York social-services counselor Donna...
...language problem is only the first barrier to understanding. Many deaf people have only a rudimentary understanding of anatomy, disease and medicine. African-American deaf people, who employ their own dialect of ASL, are yet more isolated from mainstream information -- and so more endangered. Residential schools for the deaf tend to be more puritanical than those for the hearing, and sex education is less comprehensive. Some social scientists also believe that needle drug use is higher because of alienation and loneliness. Even excluding such theories, says Susan Karchmer of Gallaudet University, the world's only four-year liberal-arts school...
Once a deaf person contracts AIDS, its horrors are magnified. John Canady, the scion of a multigeneration deaf family in California, signed so exquisitely that he served as a model for an ASL textbook. His eloquence meant ) less than nothing when he ended up in a San Diego hospital with an AIDS- related crisis. Not only did his attendants fail to provide an interpreter, they also tied his hands to a gurney. Trapped for hours in the classic nightmare of I-want-to-scream-but-some one-has-his-hand-over-my-mouth, Canady died shortly after friends found...
...average hospital's public address system, non-ASL-trained staff and often complex written directions and appointment schedules are daunting for most deaf people even if they are just having their tonsils out. For AIDS patients, who may see half a dozen specialists for various complaints, the difficulties constitute a diabolical maze. Nor do many doctors reach out to make things easier. Most AIDS caseworkers with deaf clients can name one who was simply handed a piece of paper saying, "You have AIDS," with no follow- up. Quanquilla Mason, a deaf and blind New Yorker who has since died, remembered...
...scattering of clinics and outreach programs for the deaf. Some have drafted pamphlets using sign- language pictographs and explicit illustration to overcome the literacy problem. (A sample title: "AIDS -- WHAT MEANS? AIDS -- HOW STOP? LEARN ABOUT AIDS!") Others, noting, as one put it, that "the written language of ASL is videotape," have taken to camcorders. An HIV-AIDS hot line accessible to the deaf using small teletypes called TTYs can be reached at 800-243-7889. But few activists have been able to secure funding for their efforts...