#deafawareness

Your Deaf character does not have to lose their hearing in a horrificly traumatic way, like a car accident, explosion, etc.

Most Deaf people have lost their hearing due to genetic factors, infections, ear infections, medications, medication overdoses, head injuries, and birth complications. A lot of this happened early on in life.

Having your Deaf character be fluent in ASL for the sake of being fluent yet having no exposure to the Deaf community and no one to sign with or who taught them doesn't make sense.

Keep in mind that a Deaf person who lost their hearing later vs lost their hearing young will have differerent life experiences; Deaf experience varies greatly.

Finally, just because your Deaf character is Deaf, it doesn't mean their life is miserable, pointless, unfullfilling, depressing, and only traumatic.

Deaf people have a rich history, culture, language. Many Deaf people don't consider themselves disabled and often consider it a language barrier (though this varies from person to person).

When you write a Deaf character, please do research and not just make their life what you think the Deaf experience is. Don't make a Deaf character's life just miserable because you like writing traumatized 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.

RED - Physical disabilities

YELLOW - cognitive and intellectual disabilities, and neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Tourette's)

WHITE - invisible and undiagnosed diabilities

BLUE - psychiatric disabilities (Anxiety, PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, Insomnia)

GREEN - sensory processing disabilities (includes Deaf, Blind, and Deafblimd communities

BLACK - for the people we have lost

By the same logic of sound not traveling in the Void, Xisuma is partially deaf and more sensitive to sound after spending nearly three years in the Void trying to become the best admin he could be. Keralis made him his helmet after learning about that to help him readjust to being back in the Overworld. Xisuma found it so sweet he now refuses to take his helmet off.

(this was written sideways on my tablet because it is charging and the screen doesn't rotate for Tumblr so there's probably several mistakes)

what I see most often is one character who can’t speak using ASL and everyone else just… keeps talking. No. No!! You don’t do that!!! Not in real life!!! I mean you can, sure, but it’s rude and also makes it more difficult to communicate! ASL and English are two different languages that are not interchangeable. Switching between those languages constantly is hard, and in a realistic scenario if you tried this it’d just lead to the signer being ignored because talking in a language you know is easier.

it’s also so weird because all these inaccurate fanfics where characters use ASL and not a d/Deaf person in sight? Like. The main group who uses ASL in the real world. The group who ASL is literally made for. Where are they? Where are they in your stories?? It’s not that hard to write a d/Deaf person. They just can’t hear very well. You don’t even have to make it a big plot point just at least put it there, c’mon. (“they’re not deaf in canon!!” bro they aren’t gay either)

and it’s ALSO inaccurate to nonverbal people! Do many nonverbal people use ASL? Yes! But just as many use things like AAC devices to communicate, or can hardly communicate even with them. A nonverbal character is great, but it’s even better to show the breadth of the experience. I wouldn’t be complaining about this if I saw fics where characters actually had AAC devices they used, but if there are any I certainly haven’t found them! It doesn’t even have to be big, you don’t even have to change quotes, just put in the description that they typed it out or something!!

Hell, this isn’t even touching on all the other ableism surrounding these things. Like why do I only ever see fully nonverbal or d/Deaf people, why not semiverbal or hard of hearing?? Why does it seem like when people bring it up it’s always an acquired thing instead of from birth??

you. are. so. RIGHT

thank you so much anon for this ask and i’m sorry i took so long to get to you!!! and kudos to you for telling us your story 🥹 this one’s for you 🧡🧡🧡

people might’ve said it was controversial, for lando to be holding eden instead of y/n, but they’d never realise it was y/n’s idea.

the doctor’s office was quiet - ironically. eden looked around, her tiny baby arms flailing in the ear as her curious eyes looked around the white room.

lando swore he almost cried when the doctor re-entered the room with that tiny hearing aid in her hands. he looked over to his wife, that signature grin plastered on his face.

“alright…” the doctor spoke, bending down to be eye level with the baby. after a minute or so of eden’s whinging because a random stranger lady was trying to put a piece of metal on her head, the doctor was finally able to connect it. “get ready.”

as soon as the aid was turned on, eden let out a cry. lando turned the little girl around to face him before saying his first words to his daughter.

“eden, daddy’s here.”

as soon as lando spoke, eden stopped. the whole room stopped. y/n held her breath, tears brimming her eyes. suddenly, eden let out a soft giggle, and the world seemed to stop. lando let out a laugh, tears finally spilling down his cheeks.

i learned french → norwegian → english → russian → english again (after my hearing got worse) → and now i’m learning asl. and let me tell you, learning any language when you can’t rely on your hearing is exhausting. you’re relying on subtitles, lip reading, interpreters—basically anything that might help you keep up in conversations you’re already shut out of. and lip reading? it’s not a superpower, it’s educated guesswork. a ton of words look the same on the lips. sometimes you’re basically reading context clues from vibes alone.

and the whole “just talk louder” crowd doesn’t get it—talking to people is draining. every conversation is a mental marathon. you’re tracking faces, piecing together fragments, filling in blanks, and trying not to get mocked when you miss something. people act like the only communication method worth learning is spoken language, yet the second they have to put in even a fraction of the work we’ve been doing our whole lives, they tap out.

newsflash: learning sign language isn’t impossible. it’s not even the hardest thing you’ll ever do. you just don’t want to. you’re comfortable in a world that caters to you, so you think effort is optional. but if we can bend over backwards to learn the language of a world that shuts us out, you can take the time to learn the language that lets us in.