Things that I wish I had

November 6, 2008 at 9:32 pm (Deaf)
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  • Floors that vibrate if the children are getting into trouble. Or maybe not…. The floors would never stop vibrating, would they?
  • A doorbell that does not only set off a strobe light, but also announces “Resident is deaf, resident is deaf” so they know I’ll be a bit coming to the door.
  • On the other hand, I want a doorbell that will auto-sense door-to-door salesman so it can say “Go away! Go away!” and save me the trouble of shooing them away.
  • I wish that I had a remote-locator that would vibrate and flash lights. There are those remote add-ons hearing people can get that will beep if they lose it. What about us deaf? We lose our keys and remotes too!
  • A little light that flashes if something is wrong with the car, rather than a beeping.
  • A baby-cry monitor that is more comfortable to wear. I have a vibrating baby-cry monitor, but it is very clunky to wear. They should resign it so that it’s the size of a beeper.
  • A fire alarm that will send flashlights to the other rooms too without costing thousands of dollars. These exist, but they are too expensive for the average deaf family.
  • A little tether to clip onto the back of my children’s pants or my pets’ collars and if they hide and I can’t find them, I can turn on the invisible fence and they will zoom right into my arms.
  • Auto-captioning of all online videos! Alas, we don’t have that, but Bill Creswell tries to caption as many as he can- THANK YOU!
  • For every public phone (these are disappearing, by the way) to have a flip down TTY.
  • For the tornado sirens in my city to flash so the deaf know to get to a shelter.

Those are just off the top of my head. What else do you all wish you had to help make our deafness not matter?

Hmmm… on second thought… I can just attach these shoes that vibrate to my children’s feet so I know where they are, train a parrot to be my doorbell and invite friends in and tell salespeople off, superglue my remote to my wrist, yell “momma has treats!” to get the hiding creatures out, and hang JiffyPop at stragetical positions throughout the house to stand in for the fire alarm…

2 Comments

  1. Bill said,

    November 7, 2008 at 5:02 am

    DOORBELLS
    “A doorbell that does not only set off a strobe light, but also announces “Resident is deaf, resident is deaf” .. that will auto-sense door-to-door salesman so it can say “Go away! Go away!” and save me the trouble of shooing them away.”

    If you announced you were deaf, wouldn’t the salesman go away automatically? Now that I think about it, I want that! :)
    ALARMS:
    What about the flashing fire alarms – we give those away in our city? Are they that expensive, or do you mean something different?

    CAPTIONING
    And auto captioning – I bet that’s coming. YouTube offers auto-translation into foreign languages, from English captions. (http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=oqBeXa7v_aE)

    I keep thinking there has got to be a way to hook up a dictation program like Dragon “Naturally Speaking” http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/
    that you could hook up to your computer to give you a rough transcript of what’s being said.

  2. David said,

    November 7, 2008 at 7:31 am

    I love these ideas!
    You should work with some companies with these.


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