I spent this morning cleaning DeafRead’s feeds. Updating feeds that hasn’t been blogged on for more than 6 months so that they’re checked once every 24 hours as opposed to every hour. Disabling feeds of blogs that died. Tidied up and uncluttered, remaining are 602 active feeds.

Going through them is walking down the memory lane. There are little resources out there which archives our deaf history, especially on two levels 1) “live” We’re writing about things that are happening to us that day. That week. It’s happening now. and 2) “reality” We’re regular people living our days in and out. We may or may not be trained writers. We are grassroot.

DeafRead is a library of the everyday deaf life.

And because of that library, I plucked out an article of significant interest. Chuck Baird left his mark on the blogosphere to remain with us long after his passing. Baird a permanent part of deaf history, we, anyone with internet access, can appreciate reading his own words and then reflect his impact on us as a culture.

The DeafRead library isn’t limited to new things being created as they happen. There are instances where a blogger digs deep in history, and brings it back into present time. George Veditz was famously given a second life, albeit virtually. Recently, Dianrez flew through the decades of old, retrieving and re-telling the story of deaf artist F.M. Tuttle. What appears long forgotten, now is remembered and passed for generations.

And what of Chuck Baird Foundation? It seems very much alive. If your heart’s in supporting deaf art and artists, consider helping.

Here is the link: Loud and Clear: Metro Station Ad Targeting Deaf is Big Hit. The vlog mentioned in the article is here. Express Night Out is a Washington D.C. local newspaper. The Deaf World is small, right? My daughter attends class with the author’s nephew, who are both KODAs.

Governor Cuomo’s budget proposal threatens the existence of schools for the deaf in New York State. I appeal to every one of the decision-makers in the Legislature to resist this proposal.

My name is Bernard Bragg. I graduated from the New York School for the Deaf, better known as “FANWOOD”, in 1947 – more than a half-century ago. I undertook many activities during my career at Fanwood – actively involved in sports, dramatics, literary programs and assembly lectures. Most importantly, I studied under a number of highly skilled teachers, both hearing and deaf, who helped prepare me for my future. Thanks to their influence, I became a teacher myself at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley and Gallaudet University, my alma mater. I helped found one of the most influential theatre groups in the world, the National Theatre of the Deaf.

Many Deaf people graduated from Fanwood and became successful leaders in education, advocacy and employment. To mention a few, they are:

Alex Fleischman: Senior executive in sports associations for the Deaf as well as in Jewish Deaf associations.

Fred Schreiber: A world famous leader of the National Association of the Deaf, serving as its CEO for 20 years.

Larry Newman: Superintendent of Instruction at the California School of the Deaf at Riverside. He was also President of the NAD for two terms and recently published two influential books.

Taras B. Denis: Former English teacher and long-time guidance counselor at Fanwood.

Philip Bravin: Former chairperson of the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University.

Harvey Goodstein: Former CEO of Deaf Way (10,000 people in attendance) and presently on the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University.

Al Berke: A staunch advocacy leader in politics and sports.

I ask, if the New York School for the Deaf closes down due to the Governor’s budget cuts, where will many young deaf and hard-of-hearing students go? Are you suggesting they enter public schools which cannot provide them with a sign language rich environment, instead giving them interpreters, many of whom are not trained in deaf education. These public schools cannot provide a deaf child with activities like signed theater, signed literary programs, and signed assembly lectures. They will fail to provide a free and appropriate public education, and they will fail to provide a FAPE in the least restrictive environment. I foresee that New York courts will see a rise in IDEA litigation.

To each one of you, decision-makers, I appeal to your conscience and your humanity. The future of deaf children depends on your good judgment and empathy.

Sincerely,
Bernard Bragg

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Re-published upon Dr. Bernard Bragg’s request and permission

Leah Katz-Hernandez wrote for the White House Blog. This is such an accomplishment for a deaf blogger, to appear in one of the world’s most important blogs. There is no stopping Leah Katz-Hernandez.

She was profiled by her alma mater, Gallaudet University, volunteered as a vlogger for National Association of the Deaf (NAD), and teamed with Toronja Williams on The Deaf Perspective blog, which appeared on DeafRead.

Here’s the White House post. Remember the name, “Leah Katz-Hernandez”. You’re bound to see it again. Congratulations on behalf of the DeafRead team!

Alexander Graham Bell was an Oral Extremist.

Mike McConnell is NOT a Oral Extremist.

AGBell’s position on Oral Education is actually the reason the plaque honoring him at NTID was removed. I wrote a Letter to the Editor and it was published in RIT’s student publication, “Reporter“, on April 14, 2000. An excerpt:

Bell strongly urged oralism — the use of speech and lip-reading — to his deaf students. The issue lies not in the method of communication he promoted, but that in he believed it was the one and only one way to teach and train deaf pupils, whatever their needs were. Had he been alive today, Bell would report that ASL, Cued Speech, PSE, SEE, etc. are ineffective and that oralism should be adopted and practiced by all Deaf people.

I went on to say that his belief didn’t fit with NTID’s communication philosophy, which accepted and encouraged the diverse communication methods and needs of the student body. The plaque was removed the summer of 2008.

I’m using Mike McConnell as an example here to contrast the philosophy difference. McConnell speaks orally because he is more comfortable with it. But he does not believe an ASL-based education is destined to fail. He believes ASL is one way to successfully educate deaf children.

Recently Candy wrote a post re-accounting some of the events that took place around the time of DeafRead’s birth. I would like to, for once and all, tell you how DeafRead came about. This is from the horse’s mouth.

I saw Jared Evans at the NAD conference in Palm Springs. At the time, he was living in San Diego. I was living in Los Angeles. He was working as a blogger for NAD at the conference. We both each had a personal blog.

Although I was at the conference, I was not a registered attendee. I would toil around in the lobby, halls and the expo floor catching up with long lost friends. I would crash the occasional party. Even I had lunch with Ricky Taylor at a nearby restaurant.

Shortly after the conference concluded, I was taking my daily walk during lunch break at work. Sitting all day at the computer called for a good stretch. It hit me like a hammer. I thought of building a blog aggregator. I instantly turned back to return to my office desk, walking in a frisky manner. I immediately, and out of excitement, reached Jared.

Before the conference, Jared and I had not spoken all that much. We used to, but for a good period of time, he had lived in Rochester, New York while I was living in New York City and San Diego. He, to my surprise, moved to my city, San Diego. We definitely re-connected. After a year, I moved to Washington DC to attend Gallaudet University to acquire my masters degree. Upon graduation, I again relocated to California, in Los Angeles. It was during my year in D.C. that we kinda lost contact again.

When I had the blog aggregator idea, I immediately thought of Jared. He is the only guy that I knew very well, had the technical skills, and most important of all, a great heart. At this time (2006), I’d known him for 11 years and hold him in the highest regards of adhering to good values.

I reached him on Google’s chat, GTalk. He responded. And he promptly agreed to work together on the aggregator. Then I quickly came up with the name, DeafRead. He again agreed promptly to the name.

So DeafRead was born. For the next week, I worked feverishly to create the site. I worked late nights. Very late. I recall he took a trip the following weekend to Solvang, California. Upon his return, he asked how things were going. “We’re almost ready to launch!”, I exclaimed.

Two days later, or 7 days after DeafRead was conceived, DeafRead launched with 4 blogs. This was July 2006.

During the week in which I was building the very foundations of DeafRead, Ella was doing a project with Dawn Sign Press (DSP), where Jared worked. He was stoked about it, and explained that she was well-respected in the ASL community, having authored books on the subject. I agreed when he wanted to see what Ella thought of DeafRead.

Jared responded that Ella was enthusiastic about the site, and that it was something that we should pursue. This is just off my head. The only recorded message I could find of Jared’s description of his encounter with Ella is this:

Jared: she says that she wants us to keep track of these counts for future research I was thinking that our raw logs, we should keep those for archival purposes who knows… it might provide useful in the future when doing historical research

I know this is not much proof in the case of recorded messages, but I definitely don’t recall Ella clamoring about how wonderful it would be for Deafhood to be on DeafRead; that DeafRead should be for Deafhood only. I know it didn’t happen, because I would have shrugged it off perhaps with a little discontentment. I wasn’t going to allow one idea claim ownership of DeafRead. Right from the beginning, DeafRead was going to be for everyone and everything deaf-related. That was the agreement and understanding between me and Jared. We never questioned it, nor thought about changing this philosophy. We were glad to have Deafhood come on DeafRead, because it was such a new and novel idea, but it wasn’t going to own DeafRead. Nothing was going to, except for “deaf”.

The only thing I took from Jared’s encounter with Ella was that we had the support of someone well-respected in the ASL community. It was a small boost. I appreciated her feedback and belief that DeafRead was worthy of reality.

Now, I’d like to go back a little in time to the days of Gallaudet University’s announcement of the President finalists. I was contacted by a friend who wanted to bring more awareness about the search process. He felt that not enough people realized how paramount a moment this was in Gallaudet Unviersity’s history and future, and I agreed. After one month of running the site, GallyPrezWatch.com, it had reached 400,000 pageviews. Sure, websites surpass this number of pageviews in a month, but rarely does one reach this in its first month.

After Fernandes was elected, the guy I worked with wanted to close the site. He felt that the comments were too scathing — Ron Stern’s kids’ were being dragged through mud. A picture was put up in the list of finalists of Koko, the signing gorilla. This was purely to be satircal and humorous. If anyone read the blog posts, it was clear this person was dripping of satire. But we were accused of being racial and insensitive to colored people. To fuel this further, it didn’t help that Dr. Glen Anderson failed to become one of the finalists. But in all, we accomplished our goal: awareness was definitely raised. 1,000+ comments were made on the day of Fernandes’ selection.

Although it was a profound experience as a developer and administrator, I felt it had no bearing on the reason I wanted to create DeafRead. It was in the summer time. Any protests to Fernandes’ presidency had died down. I remember thinking to myself, I wanted to create DeafRead to empower people to say what they wanted.

One common misconception I’ve seen, and have corrected here and there, but without full effort, is that DeafRead was created to cover the Gallaudet University protests. DeafRead was created in July 2006, and the Gallaudet protests did not take off until October 2006. Yes, DeafRead’s success is owed to the Gallaudet protests. Awareness of DeafRead grew exponentially during this time. It was one of the main sources to get instant information (and rumors) about the protest as it unfolded. Ricky Taylor and Elizabeth Gillespie were some of the prominent bloggers covering the protest.

During the heights of the Gallaudet protests, DeafRead was seeing as many as 30,000 pageviews a day.

Fast forward to the summer of 2009. During the v/blog symposium hosted by LaRonda Zupp and DCARA, I gave a presentation in which I said DeafRead helped get the word out about Deafhood, Deaf Bilingual Coalition (DBC) and Audism Free America (AFA). I was happy for this, after all, it was empowerment that was taking place on DeafRead. In fact, John Egbert was on DeafRead before DBC was founded. It was the discussions on DeafRead’s blogs that probably had some influence on the beginnings of DBC. Surely, when DBC was ready to be launched, DeafRead was the place to do it.

Later in the day at the symposium, it was Ella’s turn to give her presentation. One of the first things she said, and I remember this quite well, was something along those lines: “Someone told me that someone (me) claimed that DeafRead helped spread the word about Deafhood (etc). Well, yes, blogs and vlogs helped spread the word.”

Someone felt it was important enough to tell Ella what I had said during my presentation. And Ella felt it was important enough to respond (or to “correct the information”?) during her presentation onstage. At the very least, we have her public acknowledgement that DeafRead played a role.

The irony in all this: The people involved with Deafhood, DBC and AFA and whatnot, have tried several times to close DeafRead and DeafVIDEO.TV — the same media which helped give birth to their organizations.

What a way to thank us!

Yes, Candy is correct: we offered to serve DeafSide.com. The panelists were difficult to gather, and in the end, they did not do what they needed to do. They backed out. So with that, DeafSide.com fell into the darkness.

Trying the DeafSide approach once again, I offered Ella the opportunity to administrate an EXACT COPY of DeafVIDEO.TV last spring. I was giving her full administrative powers. It was in response to her claims that DeafRead and DeafVIDEO.TV wasn’t what she thought it was. So by offering her this site, she could create a community to her exact liking. In response, she asked: “What is your rationale and what are your plans for incorporating anti-cyberbullying and audism guidelines on DeafRead and DeafVIDEO.TV?” This was during the time of yet another effort to close DeafRead and DeafVIDEO.TV.

Well, hello! I have the DeafRead guidelines and DeafVIDEO.TV’s R-List. And I’d already stated my position on incorporating audism in the guidelines. It wasn’t allowed, but because it was widely abused as a term, it would instead be enforced under the harassment rule.

Ella resumed to vlog and leave video comments at another website. She had asked me about anti-cyberbullying measures and was using a website whose owner subtly threatened a vlogger, said it was OK for his users to cyberbully people outside the site, and worse of all — cyberbullied others.

Karma is funny.

Gallaudet University is hosting its first film festival the weekend of November 4-7, 2010. The World Deaf Cinema Festival will feature Marlee Matlin and Producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. For more information and videos, go to: wdcf.gallaudet.edu (I will be moderating a forum, “Deaf Images in Cinema” at the festival).

I was asked by someone involved with the TV show to post this on y³.
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ABC Family is looking for an amazing young deaf actress to star in a new TV series (and two male deaf actors too)!

The show revolves around Daphne, a smart, confident and well-adjusted deaf teenager who has her world turned upside down when she discovers that she was switched at birth with another girl.

If you meet the characters’ requirements below, submit a video of yourself by October 15th, 2010. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU MUST SIGN A WAIVER BEFORE SUBMITTING ANY VIDEO.

For more information about the project, including instructions on how to submit your video, and how to get a copy of the waiver, please go to www.facebook.com/SwitchedSearch.

DAPHNE – actress must be deaf or hard of hearing and must SPEAK WELL, American Sign Language preferred. Age range from 16 to early 20’s to play high school. Actress is to be light-haired or willing to dye hair blond for the role, and if the show moves to series, actress must be willing to relocate to Los Angeles in February.

Smart, confident, and well-adjusted Daphne is stunned to learn that she and Bay Kennish were accidentally switched at birth 15 years ago. Having grown up in a working-class household as the only child of a single mom, she is excited to meet her new parents, and especially thrilled at the idea of having brothers and a dad. But balancing two families is trickier than she expected, particularly because her biological parents have never been around anyone deaf, and are eager for her to enter a mainstream school and a less deaf-centric world.

EMMETT – 16, actor must be deaf or hard of hearing, must be fluent in American Sign Language. Emmett is Daphne’s best friend. Raised by deaf parents and educated in a deaf school, Emmett doesn’t talk orally, and is more comfortable in a deaf world. Rugged, reserved, a young deaf James Dean.

PENN – late 30’s or 40’s. Male, actor must be deaf or hard of hearing, must SPEAK WELL. Penn is Emmett’s father and Daphne’s mother’s best friend. Penn is the one who educated Daphne’s mother about the importance of learning sign, schooling Daphne in a deaf world, etc.

Again, if you would like to audition, go to http://www.facebook.com/SwitchedSearch to find all the instructions on how and where to submit your video.

Hurry – we need to find our actors in the next couple of weeks! And please spread the word — if you know a “Daphne”, “Emmett”, or “Penn”, tell them about this and help them audition! This might just be the break that makes someone’s dreams come true!

Good luck!