Association of Late-Deafened Adults (ALDA) is an organization for people who become deaf after childhood. ALDA was founded in 1987 by Bill Graham and Kathie Hering of Chicago, Illinois. [1] Within a few years, the organization had chapters in over 15 regions across the United States. The primary growth vehicle was ALDA News, a monthly newsletter.[ citation needed ]
By 1989 ALDA had begun holding annual conventions, known as ALDAcons. People from throughout the world have attended these conventions, which feature workshops, an exhibit hall, and social activities. The climax of the conventions is a Saturday night party featuring karaoke.[ citation needed ] I. King Jordan, president emeritus of Gallaudet University, is one of the most famous ALDAn members and has spoken frequently at the conventions. The Association presents a yearly award in his name to a member who has shown outstanding achievement as a role model for late-deafened adults. [2]
The former president of Gallaudet, Alan Hurwitz, is also a regular convention attendee.[ citation needed ]
Most recently, the Association of Late-Deafened Adults has been involved in Congressional hearings for technological improvements, such as movie theater captioning devices for theaters, [3] [4] and working with the Georgia Institute of Technology for a text conversion program for Google Glass. [5]
Marlee Matlin is an American actress. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for a BAFTA Award, and four Primetime Emmy Awards.
Gallaudet University is a private federally chartered university in Washington, D.C., for the education of the deaf and hard of hearing. It was founded in 1864 as a grammar school for both deaf and blind children. It was the first school for the advanced education of the deaf and hard of hearing in the world and remains the only higher education institution in which all programs and services are specifically designed to accommodate deaf and hard of hearing students. Hearing students are admitted to the graduate school and a small number are also admitted as undergraduates each year. The university was named after Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a notable figure in the advancement of deaf education.
Linda Bove Waterstreet is a Deaf American actress, her most notable role being a fictionalized version of herself in the PBS children's series Sesame Street from 1971 to 2002. Bove was the first Deaf actress to be a member of the program's recurring cast.
Deaf culture is the set of social beliefs, behaviors, art, literary traditions, history, values, and shared institutions of communities that are influenced by deafness and which use sign languages as the main means of communication. When used as a cultural label, especially within the culture, the word deaf is often written with a capital D and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. When used as a label for the audiological condition, it is written with a lower case d. Carl G. Croneberg was among the first to discuss analogies between Deaf and hearing cultures in his appendices C and D of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language.
Irving King Jordan is an American educator who became the first deaf president of Gallaudet University in 1988 after the Deaf President Now protest. Gallaudet is the world's only university with all programs and services designed specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.
Deaf President Now (DPN) was a student protest in March 1988 at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. The protest began on March 6, 1988, when the Board of Trustees announced its decision to appoint a hearing candidate, Elizabeth Zinser, over the other Deaf candidates, Irving King Jordan and Harvey Corson, as its seventh president.
The history of deaf people and deaf culture make up deaf history. The Deaf culture is a culture that is centered on sign language and relationships among one another. Unlike other cultures the Deaf culture is not associated with any native land as it is a global culture. While deafness is often included within the umbrella of disability, many view the Deaf community as a language minority. Throughout the years many accomplishments have been achieved by deaf people. To name the most famous, Ludwig van Beethoven and Thomas Alva Edison were both deaf and contributed great works to culture.
The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) is an organization for the promotion of the rights of deaf people in the United States. NAD was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1880 as a non-profit organization run by Deaf people to advocate for deaf rights, its first president being Robert P. McGregor of Ohio. It includes associations from all 50 states and Washington, DC, and is the US member of the World Federation of the Deaf, which has over 120 national associations of Deaf people as members. It has its headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The American School for the Deaf (ASD), originally The American Asylum, At Hartford, For The Education And Instruction Of The Deaf, is the oldest permanent school for the deaf in the United States, and the first school for deaf children anywhere in the western hemisphere. It was founded April 15, 1817, in Hartford, Connecticut, by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Mason Cogswell, and Laurent Clerc and became a state-supported school later that year.
Russell Wayne Harvard is an American actor. He made his feature film debut in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as his adopted son, H.W. Plainview. In the 2010 biopic The Hammer, he portrayed deaf NCAA championship wrestler and UFC mixed martial arts fighter Matt Hamill. Harvard also won acclaim Off Broadway in 2012 as Billy, the deaf son in an intellectual, though dysfunctional, hearing British family, in Tribes by Nina Raine. For his interpretation, he won a 2012 Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance and nominations for Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor. He played Mr. Wrench in the first and third seasons of the television series Fargo.
The National Black Deaf Advocates (NBDA) is an advocacy organization for Black deaf and hard of hearing people in the United States.
Bernard Bragg was a deaf actor, producer, director, playwright, artist, and author who is notable for being a co-founder of the National Theatre of the Deaf and for his contributions to Deaf performing culture. According to The New York Times, Bragg was "regarded by many as the leading professional deaf actor in the country".
The National Center on Deafness is an American educational institution aimed at facilitating the education of deaf students. The facilities of the National Center on Deafness are located on the campus of California State University, Northridge, Los Angeles, California. Each year the university hosts the International Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities.
Opeoluwa Sotonwa is a Deaf Nigerian American attorney, disability rights advocate and literary writer. In February 2021, Governor Charles Baker appointed Sotonwa as the Commissioner and agency head for the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Prior to his appointment as Commissioner, he was the executive director of Missouri Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. and served previously as Vice President of the National Black Deaf Advocates, the official advocacy organization for thousands of Black Deaf and Hard of Hearing Americans between 2013 and 2015. He is listed among the most influential Deaf People in the United States Opeoluwa Sotonwa attended University of Ilorin Nigeria, where he read law and graduated with LLB degree in 2005. He later proceeded to Nigerian Law School for advanced legal training. He was called to the Nigerian Bar as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in 2007. Opeoluwa worked as staff attorney with Nigerian Legal Aid Council. He later moved to United States to further his legal career and attended Howard University School of Law, where he graduated cum laude with a Master of Laws degree in 2009. Sotonwa earned his doctorate in Law and Policy from Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies in 2018.
Edith Mansford Fitzgerald (1877–1940) was a deaf American woman who invented a system for the deaf to learn proper placement of words in the construction of sentences. Her method, which was known as the 'Fitzgerald Key,' was used to teach those with hearing disabilities in three-quarters of the schools in the United States.
Blanche Wilkins Williams was an American educator of deaf children. In 1893 she became the first African American woman to graduate from the Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf. She was described by a prominent deaf newspaper as "the most accomplished deaf lady of her race in America".
Emerson Irving Romero was a Cuban-American silent film actor who worked under the screen name Tommy Albert. Romero developed the first technique to provide captions for sound films, making them accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing; his efforts inspired the invention of the captioning technique used in films and movies today.
A large deaf community exists in Frederick County, Maryland partly due to the Maryland School for the Deaf, the county's proximity to Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and a large number of government jobs. One estimate suggests that as many as 50,000 people in Frederick County and the surrounding area may be deaf or hard of hearing, and that 3,000 people in the city of Frederick may be deaf or hard of hearing. A 2013 census estimated that 8,000 people in Frederick County experience hearing difficulty. An estimated 1.2 million people in Maryland are deaf or hard of hearing and there are more than 75 deaf-owned businesses in Maryland.
Live Transcribe is a smartphone application to get realtime captions developed by Google for the Android operating system. Development on the application began in partnership with Gallaudet University. It was publicly released as a free beta for Android 5.0+ on the Google Play Store on February 4, 2019. As of early 2023 it had been downloaded over 500 million times. The app can be installed from an .apk file by sideloading and it will launch, but the actual transcription functionality is disabled, requiring creation of an account with Google.
Roslyn "Roz" Goodstein Rosen is an American advocate for the Deaf community. Rosen was the president of the National Association of the Deaf from 1990 to 1993 and was a board member for the World Federation of the Deaf from 1995 to 2003. She served in multiple academic administrator roles throughout her career, including as the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Gallaudet University, and was the director of the National Center on Deafness from 2006 to 2014.
Foley and the students are working with the Association of Late Deafened Adults in Atlanta to improve the program.