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Helen Keller Blindness Analysis

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Helen Keller once said, “Blindness cut us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.” Throughout her life Helen Keller understood how important and enlightening being able to communicate with others is. Helen Keller had many challenges and misconceptions that she had to overcome, as do all deaf people, because even though deaf people can learn to communicate, there are numerous barriers in our predominantly vocalized world.
Terminology and Causes of Deafness
What exactly is does the word deaf mean? In this article, the word deaf is used in a broad sense. Deaf includes anyone with any scale of hearing loss, but particularly people who cannot understand spoken messages through hearing alone. The inability to hear is called deafness. …show more content…

This meant that deaf children could learn to speak their national language and learn to communicate in their communities. The communities in which the deaf person lived had a huge impact on which method of communication the deaf person used.
During the 19th century there was a major wave of immigration in the United States. The major wave of immigrants caused people to be anti-immigrant as the incoming immigrants were seen as competition for jobs and caused disturbances due to differentially religious beliefs. This caused a change in how people felt the need to incorporate deaf people into American society. To incorporate deaf people into American society, oralism became the favored way of teaching deaf people with an importance on making sure deaf people were good citizens. Due to the changing of American society with the wave of immigrants, deaf people were now seen as Atavism. Atavism is a step back. It is when a trait that has disappeared suddenly reappears. Instead of being seen as special and unique, as in the Enlightenment, a deaf person is seen as defect or …show more content…

Lip reading or speech reading can be used by a deaf person to understand what a hearing person is saying. Lip reading is when a deaf person concludes a verbal message by watching lip movements. Speech reading includes lip reading but also takes into account visual clues. The visual clues can consist of eye contact, hand and/or body gestures, facial expressions, and how fast the person is speaking. Hearing people who use different hand and/or body gestures and facial expressions will be able to be understood better than those who don’t. The strength of a message can be conveyed by using facial

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