Bridging the Deaf and Hearing Worlds
by Trent Batson

The Melting Pot
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I think that probably the greatest achievement of American society is not taming the wilderness but taming our diversity. No other country has had to assimilate the wild array of peoples as we have. We called ourselves "the melting pot" in the nineteenth century and Heinz food products fit right in by stressing its 57 varieties, a kind of analogy to American society.

The sine qua non of assimilation was to learn to speak English. And, the sine qua non of success in America today is to be able to write and read English skillfully and fluently. A recent study at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York showed that career advancement for deaf graduates correlated directly with skill in English regardless of the career field and regardless of how skilled the person might be in a technical field.

The "English Problem"
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Yet, as we all know who have spent some time in deaf education, deaf people generally have difficulty in developing skill and fluency in English. English is first and foremost a spoken language, the written form trailing along like a caboose. People learn English by first learning to speak it because that's how you can engage in a lively exchange with a native user of the language. You can get constant feedback and therefore gradually be brought into the linguistic community.

If you can't hear the spoken form, however, you have a much harder row to hoe. Feedback in writing has always been so slow that learning, far from lively, is laborious and, worst of all, boring.

Americans with normal hearing grow up literally bathed in conversation. They are inundated in spoken English almost from the moment of conception, so that they come to believe English language is inherent, something they come bundled with.

A deaf child misses out almost entirely on the spoken language "bath," so she may never achieve this inner sense of English. Her parents would almost certainly have normal hearing so they would most likely be caught off-guard, as are most hearing parents, when they begin to suspect their child has a hearing problem.

Behind the English Eight-Ball
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Few parents deal with the fact of deafness very well or quickly enough. Often, deaf children miss months or even years of any meaningful linguistic interaction either in speech or in sign. They are behind the English eight ball right from the start of life.

They then spend the rest of their lives playing catchup; but, of course, they can't catch up because all the time they are laboriously studying English in the classroom, their hearing peers not only benefit form the classroom study of English but also from their continuing total immersion in a broadband English culture -- participatory conversation, overheard conversation, radio, television, musical lyrics and so on. The world of the hearing child is a world of all the varieties of English; deaf children are mere tourists in that world.

Computer Networks: The Equalizer
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How do we overcome this problem and provide the same equal access to success that we try to offer all people in America? Well, as you might guess, I think computer networks can help.

The computer is nothing if not an infinitely malleable medium. It has been called "the ultimate medium" because it can accept input in almost any form and present it in almost any form. In other words, it is the king of media because it can control and manipulate other media.

For a deaf person, then, computers offer relief from a culture dominated by the spoken word. The power of radio, the telephone, and even television to keep us in the sway of sound may be offset by computer networks, which tend to work visually. The spread of computers in society, therefore, is the best news deaf people have had since silent movies premiered at the beginning of the century (only to turn traitor in 1929 when they joined the enemy camp by becoming "talkies.").

Gallaudet's ENFI Project
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Gallaudet University, which is the world center of education and research into deafness, and the chief reason why deaf people in the United States can aspire to be first-class citizens while those in many other countries can't, has taken the lead in using computer networks to directly confront the "English problem." The ENFI Project (English Natural Form Instruction) has caught the attention of the nation because it turns a technology that already permeates our culture to an extraordinarily inventive and hopeful new use: it allows deaf people, for the first time ever in history, to actively and freely engage in group conversation in a spoken language -- in our case, English.

That's a stunning breakthrough. And it wasn't possible until computer networks were widely available to support such a group written conversation.

For hackers, a "deluxe chat" program supporting conversation is fun; for deaf people, it's the royal road to linguistic equality. This kind of application offers hope that all deaf people may be able to overcome their own particular barrier -- limited access to interactive English -- and function easily and freely in our society.

The Universal Hearing Aid
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I described ENFI to a colleague of mine at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After hearing how deaf people and hearing people can now communicate using computers, he said, "ah ha, finally a universal hearing aid."

ADAPSO, the computer software and services industry association, has given the ENFI project a grant of both money and expertise. Gallaudet has pioneered ENFI, has alerted the world to its existence, and is overseeing its introduction into the larger academic world. ADAPSO has graciously come forward to serve as our partner to further develop the potential of ENFI within the deaf world - to make the communication links in our society more broadly accessible, or, in other words, to create the universal hearing aid.

In effect, we're making our society barrier-free for deaf people, so deaf people can "hear" us and so we can "hear" them. Only in a free exchange can something as complex as a language be transmitted and only computer networks work quickly enough to support such a free linguistic exchange.

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Author's note: Dr. Trent Batson, Director of the ENFI Project,
can be reached at Gallaudet University, Washington, DC 20002.
(202) 651-5494.