Hello, everyone. I am the person with severe to profound hearing loss who primarily use sign language or written/text notes, I don’t live close to any of Deaf communities so I am considering just joining a local hobby club of my interest to meet people and use otter.ai on my phone to communicate with hearing people who don’t sign, would that be a great idea? To anyone who’s deaf here, have you ever used otter.ai to communicate with your non-signing hearing friends? Let me know! Thank you!
4 comments
I’m not deaf but imo it’d be a great idea.
As long as wherever you went had a decently friendly atmosphere I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to get to know you, I’m always plenty interested getting to know someone with a different life experience to me.
Not gonna read your post because I don’t need to. YES, go have fun.
It’s never a bad idea! Go for it and I wish you all the best 🙂
It’s always a good idea to try. I am almost certainly about to say something that you already know and have experienced, but you will need to be patient at first and unfortunately, you are going to have to do a lot of the work to educate people. A lot of hearing people have never interacted with a Deaf person and they get nervous or afraid they are going to make a mistake or do/say something dumb. Some people may get impatient with texting and you may get the dreaded “Oh, never mind.” or “I’ll tell you later.” Some will make cultural faux pas because they don’t know anything about Deaf culture. But… there will also likely be people who are kind and patient and genuinely interested in sharing your hobby with you. It might help to send a note to the group ahead of time “I have been knitting for 10 years and I’m really looking forward to joining a group of knitters.” (or whatever your hobby is) I am Deaf and I usually have conversations with hearing people by using the [otter.ai](https://otter.ai) app. Here is a link to a YouTube video about how it works. I am really looking forward to meeting everyone next week.”