Thanks for the welcomes everyone.
I am curious, What prompted you to become interested in Deaf Culture, Deaf Life, Deaf Attitudes, so and on? Is there an interest to you to do this or that?
Basically, I strongly believe in doing good and that each person should do good with whatever he/she has been blessed with.
About half a year ago, I came to realise how important my company's communication services were to Deaf people. I discussed things with my colleagues and we decided that we'd give our services away at cost price (i.e. no profit) to Deaf charities and companies working with Deaf people. And so, we got in touch with lots of Deaf charities, but none of them seemed to be interested and that was that.
More recently, I started to think that that approach was not the right one. All companies could use our technology (and other similar technology) to make their services just as accessible to Deaf people as they were to hearing people. We thought again and decided to engage in a Deaf Awareness campaign that provided a set of ongoing solutions to hearing organisations and, rather than charge cost-price, earn the usual profit and donate the profits to Deaf needs.
Obviously, to engage in a Deaf Awareness campaign, we would have to be Deaf Aware and so my journey into Deaf life has begun by joining a long distance course and making Deaf friends.
I must say, though, that what I've learned so far is truly amazing. Up until Nick introduced himself, I never hear of "finger spelling" - I'd only heard the phrase "sign language". I didn't realise that each country had its own sign language and, possibly, its own sign alphabet. I also learned that sign language has its own fonts. I've also learned that there are a lot of Deaf Charity scams which approach AD (lol!). I also guessed that Deaf people must value friendship much more and reporting this all back to my wife, she is also amazed and we're both thoroughly impressed.
In short, my journey into Deaf life is part of corporate social responsibility which I hope & think I'm really going to enjoy as an individual.
My course is going to be here in about 10 days and I'm trying to refrain myself from asking questions that I should learn through the course.
Hopefully, we'll start the campaign's blog soon and I hope you can all play a part in bringing about the big change which I'm trying to achieve.
to AllDeaf forum. I hope you enjoy reading and posting the threads here. Just hope you have fun with us. See you around. 