Thesis (M. A.. (African Languages)) -- University of Limpopo, 2018 / Support and training services serves as a key to easy life for the deaf community. The whole experience allows deaf people to batter people who understand who they are and how life should be. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the support and training Sign Language services provided at Setotolwane Secondary School. Data was collected from Setotolwane Secondary School using semi-structured interviews. Qualitative approach was used where ten (10) people were interviewed. Among then there were five (5) deaf learners and five (5) Sign Language teachers. Finally, the results show that deaf people are being provided with support and training Sign Language service. The services provided are not enough that are further recommendations to improve in the situation. This study aims to indicate how relevant support and training can improve and empower the deaf community around the world. Keywords Sign Language, support services, training services

For the past two centuries deaf people in the United States have faced more or less intense skepticism about their marriages to each other, largely due to fears of inherited deafness. Theses fears, while always present, have waxed and waned over time, becoming most prominent during the eugenics era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At Gallaudet University, they were repeatedly expressed by the faculty and administration in a variety of forms and contexts, and echoed by many its students. This dissertation demonstrates the significant influence of these ideas at Gallaudet University on the wider deaf community over the last century; it traces how skepticism toward deaf marriage was framed in terms of hereditarian and, for a time, eugenic ideals; and it explored other more subtle but similarly effective attempts to influence marriage decisions by deaf people. The idea that deaf people should not marry one another was embraced by faculty in Gallaudet’s early decades, diffused from administration to faculty, from faculty to students (deaf undergraduates as well as hearing students studying deaf education), and ultimately carried to other deaf educational institutions via the alumni. While student responses to these ideas were fluid, their adoption by early administration and faculty had a profound and lasting impact. One result was that, during much of the early twentieth century, deaf people were less likely to marry, and when married less likely to have children.

Deaf lesbians are a population that is underrepresented in the academic literature. Through the use of narrative inquiry, the researcher conducted in-depth interviews with a woman who self-identified as Deaf and lesbian. She shared her experiences growing up as a woman who is Deaf and later in her life, realized she is lesbian. The researcher juxtaposed her experiences as a hearing, lesbian woman and an ally to the Deaf community to better illuminate the Deaf lesbian experiences. The research delved into how these dual minority identities have affected the Deaf lesbian participant as she makes her way in the world of the dual majority cultures of hearing and heteronormative.

<p>The more geneticists discover about which genes cause what traits, the more medical practitioners as well as ethicists will have to deal with questions such as which of the myriad of identifiable conditions could or should be allowed for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and subsequent implantation via in vitro fertilization. Not a lot of controversy seems to be raised when it comes to performing PGD for serious genetic conditions such as Tay-Sachs disease or Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, but what about other characteristics, for example, those which we normally would call disabilities? This thesis tackles this question, and in partifular the possibility of implanting embryos with that screen positive for deafness, as deaf parents, especially those coming from the Deaf community who see their condition as a positive part of their identity and cultural belongingness, have expressed interest in ensuring the birth of a deaf child. This thesis thus raises the questions: is deafness a disease, or just an unfortunate condition? Are the deaf justified in purposefully implanting a baby diagnosed to be deaf? The thesis tries to grapple with why deaf parents may want deaf children, and show how these wishes may be justified. Concluding that neither the medical model of disease nor the principle-based approach—which weighs beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy and justice—are sufficient in opposing the implantation of deaf babies, it is proposed that a different theory, model or philosophy of health should be espoused if we are still to find the implantation of deaf babies problematic. That is, while the mainstream may ask: “Why ensure the birth of a deaf child?”, we ask, “Why not?” Policymakers and ethicists must be able to tackle this question sufficiently if they would allow to screen for deafness, but only to ensure the birth of hearing children.</p>

<p>This thesis o ers some prototypes to provide browser-based and mobile video communication services for Deaf people and evaluates these prototypes. The aim of this research is to identify an acceptable video communication technology for Deaf people by designing and evaluating several prototypes. The goal is to nd one that Deaf people would like to use in their day-to-day life. The thesis focuses on two technologies | browser-based systems and mobile applications. Several challenges emerged, for example, speci c Deaf user requirements are di cult to obtain, the technical details must be hidden from end users, and evaluation of prototypes includes both technical and social aspects. This thesis describes work to provide South African Sign Language communication for Deaf users in a disadvantaged Deaf community in Cape Town. We posit an experimental design to evaluate browser-based and mobile technologies in order to learn what constitutes acceptable video communication for Deaf users. Two browser-based prototypes and two mobile prototypes were built to this e ect. Both qualitative data and quantitative data are collected with user tests to evaluate the prototypes. The video quality of Android satis es Deaf people, and the portable asynchronous communication is convenient for Deaf users. The server performance is low on bandwidth, and will therefore cost less than other alternatives, although Deaf people feel the handset is costly.</p>

The more geneticists discover about which genes cause what traits, the more medical practitioners as well as ethicists will have to deal with questions such as which of the myriad of identifiable conditions could or should be allowed for preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and subsequent implantation via in vitro fertilization. Not a lot of controversy seems to be raised when it comes to performing PGD for serious genetic conditions such as Tay-Sachs disease or Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, but what about other characteristics, for example, those which we normally would call disabilities? This thesis tackles this question, and in partifular the possibility of implanting embryos with that screen positive for deafness, as deaf parents, especially those coming from the Deaf community who see their condition as a positive part of their identity and cultural belongingness, have expressed interest in ensuring the birth of a deaf child. This thesis thus raises the questions: is deafness a disease, or just an unfortunate condition? Are the deaf justified in purposefully implanting a baby diagnosed to be deaf? The thesis tries to grapple with why deaf parents may want deaf children, and show how these wishes may be justified. Concluding that neither the medical model of disease nor the principle-based approach—which weighs beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy and justice—are sufficient in opposing the implantation of deaf babies, it is proposed that a different theory, model or philosophy of health should be espoused if we are still to find the implantation of deaf babies problematic. That is, while the mainstream may ask: “Why ensure the birth of a deaf child?”, we ask, “Why not?” Policymakers and ethicists must be able to tackle this question sufficiently if they would allow to screen for deafness, but only to ensure the birth of hearing children.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Title from disc label. Available also from UMI Company.

Not available / text

The Discourse of Embodiment in the Nineteenth-Century British and North American Sign Language Debates examines the transatlantic cultural reception of deafness and signed languages to determine why a largely successful nineteenth-century movement known as Oralism advocated the eradication of signed languages. The dissertation answers this question through exploring a range of texts including fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Oralist texts by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Arnold, and deaf resistance texts including poetry and proposals to establish Deaf settlements. I argue that Oralists – and a wider Victorian culture – believed that signed languages were inferior to spoken and written languages because they believed that signed languages were more embodied than these other modes of language. This charge of embodiedness produced negative constructions of signed languages as more concrete, iconic, and primitive than speech and writing. In chapter one, I examine poetry written by deaf people in order to uncover the phonocentrism that underscored both Oralism and the dominant nineteenth-century construction of the importance of aural and oral sound to poetry. In chapter two, I consider the relationship between the sign language debates and the debates around evolution in order to argue that both sides of the evolutionary debate were invested in making deaf people speak. In chapter three, I consider Wilkie Collins’s depiction of a deaf heroine in his novel Hide and Seek. I argue that Collins’s desire to make his heroine speak through her body rather than sign points to the difficulties of representing a signing deaf person within the conventions of the Victorian novel. Finally, chapter four focuses on the rhetoric around deaf intermarriage and community as it arose in the eugenicist turn taken by Oralism. Using a variety of theoretical approaches including Deaf and Disability Studies, post-structuralist understandings of language, and animal studies, I examine how cultural constructions of deafness and signed languages reveal nineteenth-century anxieties about the nature of language, the meaning of bodily difference, and the definition of the human in the post-Darwinian era. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-23 17:20:59.793

<p>This thesis o ers some prototypes to provide browser-based and mobile video communication services for Deaf people and evaluates these prototypes. The aim of this research is to identify an acceptable video communication technology for Deaf people by designing and evaluating several prototypes. The goal is to nd one that Deaf people would like to use in their day-to-day life. The thesis focuses on two technologies | browser-based systems and mobile applications. Several challenges emerged, for example, speci c Deaf user requirements are di cult to obtain, the technical details must be hidden from end users, and evaluation of prototypes includes both technical and social aspects. This thesis describes work to provide South African Sign Language communication for Deaf users in a disadvantaged Deaf community in Cape Town. We posit an experimental design to evaluate browser-based and mobile technologies in order to learn what constitutes acceptable video communication for Deaf users. Two browser-based prototypes and two mobile prototypes were built to this e ect. Both qualitative data and quantitative data are collected with user tests to evaluate the prototypes. The video quality of Android satis es Deaf people, and the portable asynchronous communication is convenient for Deaf users. The server performance is low on bandwidth, and will therefore cost less than other alternatives, although Deaf people feel the handset is costly.</p>