Sign language disappearing?

Students sign at St. Joseph's School for the Deaf in the Bronx.

Photo by Ann Weathersby, New York magazine.

Lou Ann Walker wrote an interesting article in New York magazine for its Jan. 21-28 double issue on Peace + Quiet, looking at how sign language may be experiencing a downturn because of the growing use of cochlear implants for babies and children with hearing impairments. She went to the St. Joseph School for the Deaf in the Bronx to investigate language changes the school is seeing among its students.

As the hearing daughter of deaf parents, sign language is Walker's first language. What she found at St. Joseph's is that the parents of kids with cochlear implants are hesitant to have their children gain fluency in American Sign Language (ASL). She writes, "Many parents are resistant to letting children with implants learn ASL; teachers are discouraged from using it, with oral and lip-reading instruction now favored. More deaf children are being mainstreamed into public-school classrooms. But not all children succeed with implants, and if they are unable to acquire enough tools to communicate, they fall behind. The battles over ASL are not so much about the absence of hearing as about the presence of a language."

Her article goes on to explore the debate over oralism, which encourages deaf children to speak verbally and lip-read rather than sign. She makes an excellent argument for the importance of sign language for a deaf child's development, especially in the area of visual creativity that sign emphasizes.

Walker is the author of several books about deafness -- A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family (1987), Hand, Heart, and Mind: The Story of the Education of America's Deaf People (1994), and the children's book, Amy, the Story of a Deaf Child.

It's wonderful to see Walker bring her expertise about the education of deaf people to a general interest magazine like New York. Sign language is the lynchpin in the development of deaf culture in America, so its existence remains vital. Walker explains that the debate on how to best educate deaf children shouldn't be an either-or situation: "As someone who lives in the world of words and signs, I support whatever will give a child as much language as possible. I am for cochlear implants and I am for sign language. I wish so many people didn’t see those two as mutually exclusive. "

Ironically, while the debate rages in deaf education circles, sign language appears to be gaining popularity in the hearing world. Students are taking sign for their "foreign language" requirement at some schools, and hearing parents are teaching their hearing babies sign, because infants have the hand dexterity to sign before their vocal cords have the ability to speak. Here's a parenting site article about it.

The actress Jennifer Beals mentioned on "The View" in January that she began teaching her baby sign language at 4 months. She has been reunited with her long-time friend, deaf actress, Marlee Matlin, on seasons 4 and 5 of "The L Word," which led to Beals revitalizing her own signing skills. Even the toddler actor that "The L Word" is using to play Beals' daughter on the show is signing. Thanks Marlee for bringing more sign language to TV!

Disability Beat Radio available online

Vicki Niswander hosts Disability Beat Radio on WEFT in Champaign, Ill. Disability Beat is a public affairs program covering topics for people with disabilities. The show discusses social justice, community supports, accessibility, integration, inclusion, opportunities, freedom and choice.

You can listen to it online at:
http://www.esnips.com/web/disabilitybeatradioonweftchampaign.

Disability culture embraces a good joke

Visually impaired writer and poet Kathi Wolfe explores this topic in her Feb. column for Scene4 online magazine, an international magazine of arts and media. She writes, "Disability culture painting, poetry, dance, theater, cartoons and fiction isn’t of the maudlin disease-of-the-week variety. Crip creative artists are making art, using their talent and craft, not bowing before the altar of 'inspirational' icons. They, along with a small number of their non-disabled peers, are creating images of crips, in all of our variety. Depicting, without embarrassment, our different bodies and showcasing our varied personalities and perceptions. If you can’t accept that people with disabilities can be sinners as well as saints, funny as well as sad, and frauds and fakes, you’ll never 'believe that we’re fully human,' my friend George Covington, a legally blind writer in Alpine, Texas, told me in a phone interview."

Read her entire column here:
http://www.scene4.com/html/kathiwolfe0208.html

Paralympian appears in Lincoln car ads

I flipped open my Jan. 27 NY Times magazine to find Paralympian Sarah Reinertsen in a two-page ad for the new 2008 Lincoln MKZ. As the first female amputee to compete in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii, she is a good fit for the Lincoln ad campaign, which is "Reach Higher." She holds the world record in the half marathon (2:12) and the marathon (5:27) for above-knee amputee women. Reinertsen was born with a bone-growth disorder and her left leg was amputated above the knee when she was 7.

Her statement in the ad copy reads: "My parents always treated me like any other kid. And when I fell, my mom didn't always rush to pick me up. 'Sarah's going to pick herself up.' It was a really important lesson for me to learn. For me to keep up, I always had to be tougher than the rest. And I think that's still true today."

Blind actor appears on "Nip/Tuck"

Rick Boggs appeared in the Jan. 22 episode of the plastic surgery drama, Nip/Tuck, as a blind person training Bradley Cooper's actor character to "play blind." It was a fun scene because Cooper played it over the top with his interrogation of Rick's "blind experience" that he wanted to bring the role. In typical Nip/Tuck ridiculousness, Cooper's character was supposed to be an actor playing a doctor who became blind but was still performing surgery. Kudos to Rick for landing the role, which I wish had been bigger or could become a recurring role.

I have long watched Nip/Tuck, but I think it has gotten a bit creepier of late with the introduction of a devious underage character who beds the Sean McNamara character, is progressively poisoning Julia McNamara, who was her mother's lover for awhile, and even tries to convince Sean and Julia's daughter, Annie, that she should become anorexic. Nip/Tuck would be better served to go for campy, rather than creepy, IMHO.

And. . . .the show totally wasted an appearance by Academy Award-winning deaf actress, Marlee Matlin, in the Jan. 29 episode. She played a studio executive, who has to make a decision about Bradley Cooper's character after he, too, beds the devious underage character, which she videotaped. It was a ridiculous scene in which Matlin had no sign language interpreter and lots of characters were talking at once. Matlin's character had about four lines, but because she played a studio executive, I can only hope that she is coming back for more episodes to explore her character, and maybe they will remember to provide an interpreter next time.

Nip/Tuck has explored a few really good disability story lines in the past. The brilliant LP actor, Peter Dinklage (of The Station Agent), appeared in a number of episodes as an artist who works as the male nanny for Sean and Julia's new baby son, who was born with disfigured hands. Dinklage's character gives the disability perspective when Sean and Julia argue about surgery to "fix" the baby's hands. Peter Dinklage's character also has an affair with Julia, which was a step forward in TV images, because so many disabled characters are presented as asexual.

Come on Nip/Tuck, you have all these wonderful actors with disabilities on the show, let's see some ongoing story lines that don't demean them.

Japanese manga, 'Real,' focuses on wheelchair basketball team

Takehiko Inoue, the artist and writer who had a successful basketball manga series called Slam Dunk, has turned his attention to a wheelchair basketball team in Real, Vol. 1-7.

The series has already sold 9 million copies, and a Feb. 1 review in the Daily Yomiuri Online is extremely positive, and says Real explores the human drama of the basketball team members, more than than being traditional sports manga.

Here's a selection from the review: "Real has enormous story depth that can be interpreted in any number of ways. It can be a tale of overcoming mental and physical barriers, a story of growing up and letting go of your ego or a story about accepting others. It can also be a story about finding your own limits and trying to surpass them."

Much Web content ignores accessibility

A recent study by Simpleweb, a UK-based Web design and development firm, analyzed local Web design companies' Web sites for their accessibility for visually impaired or people with disabilities and found more than 75% to be inaccessible.

A United Nations-sponsored survey in 2006 had similar findings, showing that only three in 100 Web sites studied internationally had minimum accessibility standards for people with disabilities.

And in June 2007, TV Week reported the growing accessibility problems with so much TV content online -- it is not being closed captioned for deaf and hearing impaired viewers. The article explained, "The major broadcast networks have launched state-of-the-art online video players -- that do not include captions. Apple has revolutionized TV viewing by making shows available for download on iTunes -- without captions."

FCC regulations about closed captioning have not yet caught up with the current trend of watching TV online.

"Although the Federal Communications Commission requires captions for broadcast and cable content, the rules do not cover Internet streaming or digital downloads," TV Week reported. "That makes extending closed captioning to those media more a matter of corporate responsibility than regulation. The FCC rules do cover high-definition and video-on-demand delivery, but experts complain that, between companies not complying with regulations and a lack of consumer awareness, many viewers still feel chained to their traditional analog sets."

Experts in media accessibility say the technology to caption TV content online is simple to implement; there just needs to be a willingness on the part of the networks to make it happen.

This whole issue is poised to become a crisis in online accessibility. I know many young people these days who watch all their TV content online, and with the writers' strike, some new TV series may begin exclusively online. I hope the broadcast networks will step up and right this wrong.

Sundance film has paraplegic main character

I haven't had time to look through the 108-page program from the recent Sundance Film Festival to find disability content in this year's hot indie films, but I saw a reference to one film, "Quid Pro Quo," which says one of its main characters (played by Nick Stahl) is paraplegic. The film is a thriller that focuses on people who want to become amputees. This is the first film of writer/director Carlos Brooks.

Here are the production notes from the Film Festival web site:

"Quid Pro Quo is a dark, puzzling tale of strangers who crash into one another's lives and transform them forever. Isaac, a paraplegic, is a popular New York City public-radio reporter who is investigating a story from an anonymous source about a man who walked into a hospital demanding that his leg be amputated.

While pursuing the story to satisfy his own probing curiosity, Isaac meets the strikingly beautiful and mysterious Fiona, a restoration artist. Isaac's investigation not only initiates a relationship with Fiona but also leads him into the strange subculture of "wannabes," those longing for wholeness—or lack thereof—in rather peculiar ways. Will Fiona lead Isaac to answers about this underworld of seekers, or will their stormy association push him toward a more painful truth?

In his sleek directorial debut, Carlos Brooks confidently navigates the delicate line of the psychological thriller genre with the help of eerie and convincing performances from Vera Farmiga and Nick Stahl. Quid Pro Quo does not celebrate or sensationalize the subculture it portrays but instead explores the human psyche and allows the audience to ask questions. Brooks takes us on a journey to explore our desires, find order in disorder, and exhume the need to restore normalcy to a society we find ourselves ostracized from."

"Touch the Sound" of YouTube

A few months ago I saw the excellent 2005 documentary, "Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie" on the Sundance Channel. Glennie is an internationally renowned percussionist from Scotland who lost most of her hearing by age 12.

I was recently reminded via an email of a YouTube broadcast of Glennie giving a talk and performance in Monterey, Calif., in 2003. In the 34-minute presentation called "How to listen to music with your whole body," Glennie says she wants to teach people to truly listen. She also discusses her struggle to get into the Royal Academy of Music in London, where the instructors said they saw no future for a deaf musician. But she convinced them and changed the culture of the Academy so that it no longer rejects students based on disability. You can see the broadcast here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU3V6zNER4g.

I recommend the documentary, too, because her musical skill is a joy to watch and experience. It also helps anyone who sees it understand that sound is not just "heard" with the ears but experienced with the mind and body. You can see a news report about Glennie at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlOemXqTOW8. (This news report is a bit cheesy and sensationalized; the kind of "supercrip" story that I don't like to see, but it gives a bit of more background about Glennie.) But for the best Evelyn Glennie story, get "Touch the Sound"; it's out on DVD.

Evelyn Glennie became Dame Evelyn Glennie in 2007. Congrats!

"Praying with Lior" opens in Manhattan to great reviews

"Praying with Lior," a film that follows a prayer-loving Philadelphia teen with Down syndrome in his quest to be bar mitzvahed, opened in Manhattan Feb. 1. The documentary, from filmmaker Ilana Trachtman, received an excellent review in the New York Times. It is a NYT Critics' Pick, and film critic Jeanette Catsoulis writes: "Patiently and delicately, Ms. Trachtman teases out the tricky dynamics of a family dealing with a disabled child."

The documentary has been screening at Film Festivals around the country and even received a standing ovation at its world premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The filmmakers explain the mission of the film this way: "Praying with Lior is not just a documentary film for diverse audiences. It's also the centerpiece of an ambitious outreach campaign to change the way people with disabilities are perceived and received by faith communities. . . .In a society that literally 'worships' perfection and same-ness, individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities are dismissed and discriminated against everywhere. In the place where they should receive the most welcome and derive the most comfort -- their faith communities -- parents of children with special needs often hear 'your child shouldn't be here.'"

The executive director of the National Down Syndrome Society supports the film, saying this: "Praying with Lior is an important and groundbreaking film because it portrays how community inclusion, including religious inclusion, can enhance the lives of people with disabilities and the lives of everyone in the community. . . We are not aware of any existing documentary film that deals with religious inclusion in this way."

I haven't seen the film yet but it is nice to see it receive a theatrical release. It sounds to me like a perfect film for synagogues, churches, and mosques to encourage their congregations to see and discuss.

You can find out more about "Praying with Lior" at its web site:
http://www.dantrachtman.com/lior/index.htm.

Justice Dept. provides disability rights news online

Disability Rights Online News is published every two months by the U.S. Dept. of Justice.

Some of the news items in this issue include:
* Madison Square Garden will make accessibility improvements.
* Swarthmore College agrees to increase access for people with disabilities.
* Michigan Courthouse will make accessibility improvements.
* University of Michigan sued for lack of accessibility at stadium.
* Florida sheriff agrees to provide effective communication for people with disabilities.
* Three New York City hotels agree to improve accessibility.
* Stockton, Calif., Fire Department will provide services to people with HIV/AIDS.
* Georgia landlords agree to stop discriminating against people who use service animals.

"Oprah's Big Give" includes contestant who is a wheelchair user

The new ABC reality series "Oprah's Big Give," which will have 10 contestants competing to make dreams come true for strangers, features a young woman who is a wheelchair user as one of the contestants. The show begins March 2.

In addition to Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Production's involvement, Bertram van Munster and Elise Doganieri, the creators and producers of the five-time Emmy Award-winning series, "The Amazing Race," are acting as executive producers for the series.

"The Amazing Race" has a good track record (pun intended) with reaching out for diverse contestants. Little person, Charla Faddoul of Maryland, and her cousin, Mirna Hindoyan Buchinski, competed in the 5th season of the show as well as the All Stars show.

I heard Charla and Mirna speak about their experiences in fall of 2007, and Charla said, "The Amazing Race" specifically put out a call to the little people community to encourage them to try out for the show. She saw the call on a little person listserve. She and Mirna planned the videotape they sent to show producers carefully so as to illustrate that Charla was strong and fit enough to handle the race. Charla said when they made it through to the in-person audition, the cousins continued to emphasize to still skeptical producers that Charla could handle the race.

Charla and Mirna knew that any running involved in the show would put Charla at a disadvantage. "You are running against a regular-sized person that you know you can't beat," Charla said in Towson University's The Towerlight. (Both women are Towson U grads.) So their strategy to compensate for this obstacle was to fly smart. They always tried to book flights that would put them at the next destination ahead of other contestants.

The cousins were both born in Syria and speak fluent Armenian, which would sometimes anger their fellow contestants who wouldn't know what they were saying to each other. Charla said in her CBS biography that she hoped in her time on the show she could "show the world what I can do and break all stereotypes about dwarfs!”

And she and Mirna did show the world what they could do when they can close to winning "The Amazing Race -- All Stars." (They came in third.) A student of mine from Malaysia says Charla and Mirna are like rock stars there because the show is so popular.

So kudos to Oprah or whichever producer decided to include a contestant with a disability on "Oprah's Big Give." I am not much of a reality show watcher but I may just have to tune in.

"Today's Man" shows complexities of a life with Asperger's

"Today's Man" premiered on PBS' Independent Lens a few weeks ago, and I found it to be a wonderfully realistic and unsentimental look into the life of Nicky Gottlieb, a young man with Asperger's syndrome. The fact that Nicky's sister, Lizzie Gottlieb, directed the documentary is what gives it its nuanced exploration of his life. Thankfully, she allows herself to be part of the story, which is as much about family dynamics as it is about Nicky, because he still lives with their parents.

She filmed the documentary over 8 years, and she says in an interview with New York magazine that she took so long because she was waiting for something to happen that would serve as a resolution or "ending" for the film. But the conclusion she comes to is that having an open ending is really the most fitting for the family and a person with Asperger's.

What I particularly liked about the documentary is that, although Lizzie is very close to her brother and obviously cares for him deeply, she doesn't sugarcoat his life or her own future as his only family after their parents' death.

Her look at Nicky's several failures at trying to hold down a job features brutal honesty about some of Nicky's negative behaviors and unrealistic beliefs about the work world. In one scene, a supervisor is pointing out some of Nicky's problems on the job, like going through someone else's mail and telling people inappropriate things when they call the office. I think Lizzie Gottlieb showed real bravery as a sister and a filmmaker in including that scene. It is that scene and many more like it that that don't shy away from complex behaviors that sometimes affect people with Asperger's and make it difficult for some of them to fully integrate into society.

Another poignant scene is when Lizzie and Nicky talk about what their future together will be, after the death of their parents. The scene is early in the film and it helps inform the feeling throughout the film that Lizzie and her parents must try to guide Nicky toward a more independent life not just for his sake, but for the good of the entire family.

Film underway based on José Saramago's "Blindness"

Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo are set to star in the film adaptation of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago's 1995 novel, Blindness. The novel concerns a community in which an epidemic causes everyone to become blind, except the doctor's wife who feigns blindness (the character Julianne Moore will play). Chaos ensues, social structures collapse, and the doctor's wife tries to lead one group of blind people to safety.

Mark Ruffalo will play the doctor, Sandra Oh will play the Minister of Health, Gael Garcia Bernal will play the king of ward 3, and Danny Glover will play the narrator, according to imdb.com. No word yet if any blind actors are attached to the project.

Entertainment Weekly speculates that the film version will be one to watch for at the 2009 Academy Awards. The film is being directed by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, who directed 2005's "The Constant Gardener."

AG Bell Assn criticizes PepsiCo Super Bowl ad

The Alexander Graham Bell Association of the Deaf sent a letter to PepsiCo executives Jan. 31 criticizing the Super Bowl ad because it only shows deaf people signing.

According to the Deaf DC blog, AG Bell's Board President and Executive Director sent a letter that said: "Your advertisement perpetuates a common myth that all people who are deaf can only communicate using sign language." They went on to request that PepsiCo also "educate the public…and promote appreciation for those individuals that go above and beyond to overcome the absence of something many of us take for granted - the miracle of sound.”

Shane Feldman, writing in the Deaf DC blog, says he doesn't believe the Super Bowl ad "promotes" sign language or implies that it is the only language deaf people use. He sees no myth perpetuated, explaining "some (deaf people) can speak, some can sign, some can cue, some can do all, some can do some, and that’s all there is to it."