Today's accomplishment: giving part of a (group) talk in my 4th language, and making people laugh both directly and through an interpreter. Watching the audience grin and nod and crack up in two waves was just this... super-gratifying experience -- first the audience members who knew ASL, then the ones who were listening to the interpreter translate my signing into English, and I could just... track that.
Sure, I know there are still all these dysfluencies in my sign production. I'm not fully fluent yet, and I'm incredibly aware of that, and working hard on it. But to know that my personality, my sense of humor, can come through in ASL even to people who don't sign -- that's a tremendous milestone I was afraid that I might never actually reach. It's difficult to understate how personally significant this accomplishment is for me -- I've gone from "I will never learn sign language! I'm not one of those Deaf people!" to "I mean, okay, I guess I could learn it as... another language, because interpreting gives me so much that I just miss, but... I'm always going to speak for myself, especially in a work context with hearing people around," to... well... this.
My talk notes follow. I wrote them, memorized them, and then deviated from them (as one does). The larger context is that my lab (which is basically a Deaf engineering design firm) is doing a series of consumer technology reviews. These aren't technologies specifically designed for DHH people, but rather everyday technologies from a DHH perspective. For instance, other colleagues looked at various items from Nest, Alexa, etc. -- and did you know lots of these devices, even if they are visual, feature an audio-only setup? Annoyance. Folks had to keep calling over their hearing spouses, ask their kids to come over and put on their CI, etc. in order to just get through installation.
Anyway, my segment was on "technologies that wake you up," because... well, I don't own a house. And a substantial portion of our community is made of students. And I sleep super deeply, and get uber-grumpy when I'm woken up against my will -- just ask my parents; this is a lifelong known cause of Grouchy Mel.
- most alarm systems are designed for hearing people and are based on sound
- obviously doesn't work so well for DHH
- known problem: historically, all kinds of solutions - rube goldberg contraptions that drop heavy things, hearing humans (hi mom!) who will wake you up at the appointed time, praying that you'll wake up before X and not be late
- but now we have TECHNOLOGY!
- I'll examine several more modern systems for waking up DHH sleepers
- First: Can I use "hearing" alarms and somehow make them better?
- Residual hearing: amplify! plug into speaker system... okay, maybe this isn't so great for hearing housemates, and it still doesn't wake me up all the time.
- Mechanical-only solutions: put phones inside convex objects to concentrate/amplify the sound. Definitely not loud enough for me.
- Okay, another mechanical solution: set a phone alarm to vibration mode, put on a thin and hard-walled hollow clattery object and close to the edge of stuff that makes noise when other things fall on it. Yeah, terrible idea. Not the most reliable solution, good luck getting up in the middle of the night without wrecking everything, and an alarm that relies on literally dropping your multi-hundred-dollar phone on the floor every day is maybe not the wisest.
- Enter: specific devices! This is an alarm designed for DHH folks... how many of you have the Sonic Alert alarm clock? (hands go up)
- Wakes people up in three ways: audio, the sound is customizable (frequency-set knob, volume-set knob)
- "light flasher" which is an on/off outlet flasher, could plug anything in there
- "bed shaker" which is an off-center load on a motor in a case (like cell phone vibrators)
- It's definitely effective at waking you up. Abruptly. Might not be the best for your mood for the rest of the day, but it works. (Insert explanation of sleep cycles here, with a lot of hamming it up)
- Okay, but how about stuff that isn't DHH-specific? Sound aside and vibration/tactile aside, what's left as a way to wake folks up?
- Smell and taste might not be useful for alarms (although the smell of tea makes me super happy when I wake up)
- What's left is sight
- Did you know: most deaf people can see
- Did you know: most hearing people can also see
- Did you know: although sound might not work for both hearing and DHH folks, light might work for both
- This is the idea behind the Philips Wake-up Light
- Idea: you know how the sonic alert wakes you up abruptly? this wakes you gently, like the sun coming through the windows
- You set the time you want to be awake, and for a period of time before that, the lights will gradually turn on so that you're sleeping more lightly and close to waking by the time the alarm rings (with the lamp at full brightness)
- Gentle light wakeup is amazing (display, in contrast, the book cover of Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day)
- Except that it doesn't always wake you up all the way, so you need a last-minute push-over into full consciousness
- Alas, the pre-recorded audio settings on this alarm consist mostly of birdsong (from my perspective, "silence 1," "silence 2," "silence 3," and "silence 4")
- I personally need a separate alarm to make the startle sound/vibration/light at the appointed time, but the wake-up light does get me to the point where being woken up by something else is pretty pleasant
- Not a DHH-specific access issue, but the UI for button placement stinks
- Alternative, if you already have Philips Hue lights: hack the Hue to be a wake-up light
- Program the Hue! set something to turn on gradually at an appointed time
- Not as smooth as the Wake-up light, which starts from zero and smoothly goes up; definitely turns on abruptly and is a more jarring wake-up
- For me: solves the problem of "the Wake-up light needs a tip-over"
- And then Sonic Alert for mega-uber backup.
- End the talk somehow and turn the floor back over to Brian.