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Texting Gives Deaf Cell Phone Users Newfound Autonomy

by Amar Toor on September 20, 2010 at 12:55 PM

texting on cell phoneIt'd be hard to find a chunk of society more profoundly influenced by mobile technology than the deaf and otherwise hearing impaired. Ever since the dawn of the smartphone era, deaf cell phone users have been able to communicate more easily with the rest of the world -- and, for the first time, have been able to do so on their terms.

Day-to-day life at the Alabama School for the Deaf in Talladega, for example, now revolves around text messages. Nearly every student at the school has at least one mobile texting device, which can be used to communicate freely with other students, or even to order food at the local cafeteria. And, while most deaf students still prefer to communicate via sign language when speaking face-to-face with someone, being able to text has allowed them to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the world's compulsive texters.

Walter Ripley, a 54-year-old athletic director at the school, says that texting has given him the kind of communicative autonomy that simply wasn't possible before cell phones. "I don't have to depend on hearing people. It makes me a lot more independent," Ripley tells the AP. "I don't have to ask people to call for me. Asking for people to call can be very frustrating." Meanwhile, 29-year-old Matt Kochie has been texting his entire adult life, and can't even imagine communicating without SMS technology. "We'd have to go back to pen and paper," Kochie explains. "We'd have to write back and forth to communicate."

While texting may have opened up entirely new avenues of communication for deaf users, the next few years will likely see further developments that should make life still easier for the hearing impaired. Engineers at the University of Washington, for instance, have already begun testing a tool called MobileASL, which uses motion-detection technology and compressed video signals to transmit American Sign Language across cellular networks. The iPhone 4's Face Time video chat feature, moreover, has similarly opened up a new frontier of face-to-face mobile interaction that neatly dovetails with the needs of deaf users. Texting may have given deaf people a new virtual voice, but it seems like the technology of the future will allow them to use their own.

Tags: accessibility, asl, BlackBerry, cellphones, communication, deaf, HearingImpaired, iphone, Iphone4, SignLanguage, smartphone, Texting

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