He bought it. He also bought me a daisy wheel printer to go with it. The day I hooked the printer to the computer, hit the Print Screen button and heard the responsive clicking of the printer keys, I called him at work as excited as if I had won the lottery.

Two years later, I was offered a job on the basis of my computer skills. My first couple of computer jobs involved clerical work, but I wanted to work with computers on a deeper level, so I enrolled in the excellent San Antonio College Computer Information Systems program. I made good grades; won a scholarship, and settled on what was to become my life’s work.

If you read Stephen King’s “On Writing” you might recall that he defined writing as a form of telepathy. As he sat in his office writing his words in 1997, he prophesied that many years beyond 1997, a reader would read his words and, without any kind of verbal communication, he would transfer his ideas over time and space into the reader’s mind, and the reader would form a detailed, appropriate picture of King’s thoughts in his/her head. Stephen King’s brand of “Telepathy” comprises a lifeline for those of us who might not always hear or understand the spoken word.

The magic that computers bring to deaf people is that their standard medium of communication is still the written word. Moreover, computers have accelerated this type of communication so that it is nearly as fast as the spoken word.

Consider e-mail. Let’s imagine we’re having a picnic. You want me to attend on Sunday afternoon, the 15th at your house, bring a German Chocolate Cake and two packages of hot dog buns, and show up at 2:30 sharp to help barbeque. Those instructions sound pretty simple, but explaining them over the phone to a deaf or near-deaf person poses a real challenge if not a total impossibility. E-mailing the same instructions, however, offers expanded possibilities for any recipient. The message can be printed and posted on the fridge, and when you mail the message you could even include the recipe for German Chocolate Cake or a link to a website that has it.

I use e-mail extensively in my job. For my current client, I must maintain several complicated network diagrams and keep track of an ever-evolving list of servers, domains, data sources and IP addresses. The team I work with is spread out over a large area, and members work odd hours in changing locations, so when someone wants the diagrams or lists changed, they e-mail me with a brief description of the change, and I e-mail updated diagrams to the entire team. E-mail not only provides me with a reliable source of information and a quick and easy response mechanism, but also gives me a built-in “to do” list.

E-mail isn’t the only application that can help level the playing field for hearing impaired people. Live chats are very useful for communication that is even faster than e-mail. Interactive tutorials can serve as a valuable educational tool. The Internet is a wonderland of opportunity for deaf people to do business. I do much of my shopping over the Internet as you may have noticed in my July article. I established my own website to sell my products and am collaborating on its maintenance with my daughter who lives in Brazil. The same daughter and I are now building an E-Bay store.

Sometimes it’s not computer applications but the device itself that is my professional salvation. When putting together a new piece of documentation, I often have to interview subject matter experts (sometimes several at a time) and take notes on highly technical subjects. For someone who gets most of her verbal clues by reading lips, this can be quite a challenge. How does one record notes without taking one’s eyes off the speaker? I originally tried to use a micro cassette tape recorder, but I found that I couldn’t hear the tapes well enough to record the content. Now I take my laptop and set it up so that I am facing the speaker. Because I am a touch typist, I can take fairly accurate notes and keep my eyes on the speaker at the same time. Another advantage to this method is that it saves time. Once I take the notes, the content is keyed into my computer, ready for me to edit and paste into whatever format the target document requires. It goes without saying that my notes are also more legible than handwritten ones.

Judging from the hearing aid industry, however, I am rarity—a fact that causes me endless frustration. In the past 20 years I have seen the computer industry advance so far that I now own devices I never even dreamed of. Unfortunately, in the twenty-four years that I have worn hearing aids, I have often dreamed of devices I’ll never own. It appears that the hearing aid industry considers hearing aid wearers to be so limited in intelligence and manual dexterity that innovation in this field is a useless expense. When they do innovate it is for the wrong reasons, such as the assumption that the hearing impaired will do anything to try to hide their handicap.

When I got my second set of hearing aids in the early nineties, I asked my audiologist why the aids had a remote control. I guess the makers felt that a remote control spared the deaf the embarrassment of reaching up to raise or lower the volume, thus drawing attention to their aids. I suggested that if they insisted on a remote control, why not shape it like pager rather than a large fat pen, which was cumbersome to carry. A pager-shaped remote could clip to a belt where it would be less likely to get lost. She said that she had already suggested the change, and they weren’t interested. I’m sure they weren’t. I lost my first remote control and had to pay $350 for a new one with virtually the same shape, which I also lost. My newest set has no controls at all, not even an on/off switch, which is sure to fatten the pockets of battery vendors. My audiologist and I have been lobbying for a hearing aid that could connect, via wire or wirelessly, to a cell phone or MP3 player. Of course, that was another suggestion that fell on deaf ears.