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 driving to someone’s house just 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 mall crowd since they’re constantly texting, like everyone else in high school.
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. At lunch, deaf diners order burgers and fries by text: Punch in the order and show it at the counter.
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 at the school. “We’d have to write back and forth to communicate.”
Without his handheld, Walter Ripley said he would be back to relying on others for even basic communication. And texting is less work, said Ripley, 54.
“I don’t have to depend on hearing people. It makes me a lot more independent. I don’t have to ask people to call for me. Asking for people to call can be very frustrating,” said Ripley, the school’s athletic director.
Kochie and Ripley both used sign language and interpreters during interviews, and deaf people still generally favor signing when talking face-to-face. It’s…