Advice for writing Deaf or hard-of-hearing Characters!!
it's NOT silence, it's a different relationship to sound!! Some deaf characters hear some sounds, some hear none, some hear distorted or muffled versions. Deafness isn't one uniform experience, and it also depends a lot on WHEN it happened, someone born deaf and someone who lost their hearing at sixteen are going to relate to language, identity, and their own voice in really different ways.
Ask what kind before you write it, and be specific.
⤷ lipreading is exhausting and imperfect, not a superpower. It needs intense concentration, good lighting, a clear view of someone's whole face, and even then a huge chunk of words look identical on the lips (think "pat," "bat," and "mat"). A character relying on it is going to tire fast and still guess wrong sometimes, and that's just what lipreading actually is.
⤷ Not every deaf character wants to be "fixed." Cochlear implants and hearing aids are personal choices, not universal goals everyone's working toward. Some characters, especially ones raised in Deaf culture, see deafness as an identity, not something broken that needs curing, and writing every deaf character as desperate to hear again flattens that completely.
⤷ Sign language has its own grammar, it is NOT just english spelled out with hands. ASL, BSL, and every other sign language have their own sentence structures, their own grammar rules, facial expressions and eyebrow movements that carry actual grammatical meaning. A character signing isn't gesturing translated english, they're speaking a completely separate language, so don't write their dialogue as broken english just bc it's signed.
⤷ background noise isn't a minor inconvenience, it can be the whole ballgame. For characters with partial hearing, a noisy room can make conversation nearly impossible even with hearing aids in. Don't assume hearing aids work like turning the volume up evenly on everything, they don't, and a loud restaurant can be genuinely harder for a hard-of-hearing character than total silence would be.
And two more things while i'm here: please don't make the character's family the default interpreter in every scene, that's a real and pretty exhausting burden a lot of deaf people carry in real life, and it's worth showing that cost instead of treating it as a free plot convenience. And please don't write your deaf character learning full fluent sign language in like, three days, bc that's not remotely how long it takes, and it quietly implies the language is simpler than it is.
Do the research, watch some actual ASL content, and your deaf character will feel like a person :)
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