Message Coherence in “Why We Need Universal Design”

Hello, it’s great to be here. You might be noticing that I have a female voice that’s speaking for me right now. That’s because my interpreter is a woman. If I could have chosen if I could have picked anyone for tonight I think it probably would have been a British man.  

Have you ever been in that situation?  Maybe you’re in a supermarket or you’re walking down a hallway and you’re walking towards a stranger coming the opposite direction and you start that awkward dance where you’re trying to pass them and you go to the right and they go to the right. And then you go left.  You know how awkward that is. Have you ever been there?

So suppose you were deaf like I am and you’re going down the hallway and the person coming towards you is completely blind. And you start the awkward dance. What would you do? Have you ever thought about that how would you communicate?

This happened to my friend. He’s completely deaf and he was coming down the hallway and there was a blind person coming towards him. And they started the awkward dance and the blind man began to talk and my deaf friend, what was he going to do? He couldn’t hear so his first intuition is to gesture, point to his ears and say, “You know I’m deaf.” But obviously the blind man’s not going to see that. So his second intuition was to take out his phone and type in his notes.  The blind man’s not going to see that either. So the third thing he did was a little unusual. He grabbed the blind man’s hand and he held it up to his ear and he shook his head no and the blind man felt this and immediately understood, “Oh, this guy’s deaf.” That awkward dance is over. They were just able to kind of share a laugh and pass each other.

So let’s change the story a little bit. What if my friend himself was deaf but this person wasn’t blind at all. He could still see. Maybe he spoke a different language. If my friend decided to do the same thing anyway – grab his hand put it up to his ear and shake his head- now would that person still understand him? Probably. Might be a little awkward but it’d be universally understood.

This is what I do every day as a creative for Amazon and a designer. I make visuals on the front page of the world’s largest online storefront. I solve these problems that have to be accessible to millions and millions of different kinds of people with different backgrounds. As a deaf person, I have to innovate solutions all the time. I do this in my everyday life. My communication medium changes with every interaction. I have everything from a pitch pitching an idea to a client to going into a bar and simply ordering a beer, my communication style has to change. I’m constantly thinking about how to make a better solution and sometimes my solutions are awkward like for example you see me signing with two hands right now. But then I have to stop to click.  That’s one example.

But I would like to argue that everyone in this room has a disability regardless of if it’s permanent or temporary. It could be something as simple as being pregnant, having a broken arm, being older or being a child, everyone has to figure out a way to cope and navigate around their disability and these solutions are worth sharing.

One example would be my wife. She’s hearing and we visited Iceland a few years ago she’s an educator. And she wanted to take a tour of a school for the deaf. Now neither of us can read or write Icelandic and I can’t speak Icelandic sign language but being a native signer, I could understand much better than she could. And so I ended up interpreting for her for the first time in our entire relationship.  Often I’m considered the disabled one but in this situation she was the one with a disability.