I’ve reported on the Captel phone in the past and Fredericksburg.com has an article about real life experiences with it. One question remains: how accurate are the captions? I’ve sent an email to the writer.

The article is about the Vardon family that you may have seen on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I could not imagine how a son who is blind could communicate with his parents who are both deaf. Well, I thought of a few ways, but still couldn’t imagine the challenges. The article explains the technology that helps ease communications in the family.

Oh, how I’d love to have the ViaScribe for meetings and conferences. Unfortunately, this is for college settings and not personal use. I contacted a person working on the project who confirmed this. Maybe once this succeeds, personal use is the next step. That’s my hope–to have technology for translating what people are saying much like Douglas Adams’ Babelfish with words and nothing to insert into the ear!

This is not just another “baby got a cochlear implant” story. His mom invented pants for crawlers to prevent their knees from hurting and donated part of the proceeds to the Learning and Listen Foundation. I apologize for the next sentence. Isn’t that just the bee’s knees?

While reading Student sues college over notetaking, I recalled my own experiences with notetakers in college. I had one excellent one in my freshman year and a lousy one. Go figure, the lousy one was in the economics class, where I needed extra help as I stuggled with classes like that. He was an economics major, but that doesn’t mean he knew how to take notes so I could understand what was going on.
Gee, should I sue the schools (I went to two colleges) for giving me poor notetakers that caused me to have lower grades or to drop a class due to lack of information? Somehow, I made it through college with a decent GPA. It’s a shame that it was before online classes were readily available. It would’ve made life easier for me as a student.

Deafbase has good tips for people who are deaf in finding a job. It’s awful searching for jobs especially when you don’t have one or despise your current one. My husband has been out of work since March 2003. I wouldn’t whine about it as I do have two jobs to support the family (barely), but I am sick all the time. I don’t think I’ll ever get well until I can lighten my load, which can’t be done until someone hires Paul.

A person who is deaf sued Jack in the Box for discrimination and he won. He got a job with McDs after the rejection. When I was in high school, there was one place that rejected me: WalMart. Looking back, I wonder why. I worked at Toys R Us with no problems and the work is similar between the two companies. Here’s another article.