Interviewing a deaf/blind person

Has anyone ever conducted an interview with a blind or deaf person? I just did with a deaf girl who plays for the high school softball team that we cover. It was an experience to say the least, and I have a new found respect for them and their translators. Kinda cool..

 

I have interviewed a deaf young man. Very good experience, really nice kid and good story. He had pretty good hearing aids/lip reading ability. He played football, though, and the game was totally silent, obv. can't wear the aids under the helmet.

 

I interviewed a kid who was completely deaf and wrestled pretty well at a Division I school. He read lips very well, and it wasn't like he was deaf at all when we talked. Actually, the coolest part was we went for a walk about the athletics building and we had to look directly at one another while talking and we almost tripped over different thing, or ran into people. It was interesting to say the least.

 

Pretty interesting, thanks for the feedback!

Thankfully this interview was in a seated environment. ;D This girl is fully deaf, but the interview went just fine with the help of a translator.

 

About 10 years ago we had a pitcher on a state championship team that was deaf. His teammates had learned to communicate with him, but the one time I tried to do it for a feature story it was a debacle. He was having a hard time reading my lips, and I had a hard time understanding his speech.
Now his little brother is a freshman in high school, also deaf, and also a pretty good ballplayer. In a year or two I have a bad feeling history will repeat itself.

 

Apologize in advance if it's not okay to do this, but I thought it seems relevent enough to be included.

This interview is apart of a feature story on the girl who plays softball and volleyball even though she is deaf. Is this lead to ambiguous or even too long? I was concerned because it does not mention her name, curious as to what you guys thought.

"It is said that sports provide the opportunity for student athletes to form a unique bond, a bond not often found between just anybody. Sometimes, that bond comes because of a lifetime of playing together. Sometimes that bond comes naturally, a group of compatible people competing in the same discipline. However, once in a while, that bond forms because of a special circumstance, an issue not often found in or dealt with among high school athletes. The third reason happens to be the reason the Podunk area high school softball team has came together, and although communication is usually key to bonding, it is a special type of communication that makes this group strong."

 

That's what I was concerned about. Would you keep some of it, and work the anecdote in, or just scrap it completely? I have another idea I think could work.

 

Interviewed a local girl that played at galudet (sp?). Did the entire thing over aol im. It was pretty cool. Just copied and pasted. Cleaned up the typos and used it like a transcript. It was good stuff. And you never would have known how the interview was done.

 

I did a little bit of Q&A over Facebook IM, very similar to what you did. It works out well in the tech world we live in, and is no different then using e-mail to get quotes.

 

Blind swimmer many years ago.

And, Hideo Nomo's translator -- one of the best interviews I ever had.