I’m glad you don’t feel alone – the more and more I write for the Purple Communications blog, the more I see that there are other people who share the same experiences that we as deaf and hard-of-hearing people do. These are both good and challenging things, and it’s always helpful to identify with others who have gone through similar things that we have.

Thank you for reading my post – I look forward to reading your comments in future blog posts.

Thank you,

Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator

I believe you are correct in the assumption that Katie does have a fair amount of residual hearing, and this may negatively impact her ability to play a profoundly deaf individual. I say this especially as Katie plays the role of a profoundly deaf girl in Daphne who lost her hearing at a very young age. However, I will give ABC Family credit in which they chose a young lady who had a hearing loss as opposed to one who did not. I just wish they did not portray Daphne as being a deaf individual, but one that is hard-of-hearing and has some residual hearing. If they could portray Emmett’s father’s girlfriend as being hard-of-hearing, why couldn’t they do the same for Daphne?

Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator

You bring up some very valid points in your response. Lipreading is not an exact science and is something that all deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals need to work very hard at regardless of residual hearing. One thing I do want to note is that Daphne has implied on occasion that she had a hard time understanding people. Do note that the show’s focus is on entertaining as opposed to educating. If you take out the entertaining factor, you lose advertising dollars. It’s all about generating revenue.

Nonetheless, I do hope that the writers and producers are sensitive to these issues and take these thoughts into consideration.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator

As stated, I was starting to dislike the show because of the lip-reading that the character, Daphne has with the people. It is really impossible to be so perfect at lip-reading and understand everything. At least I know nobody is perfect at reading-lips, including myself because I work at hearing environment and I am not perfect at understand everything and had to double check several times.

I liked one scene from other episode where Daphne misread or did not understand one word out of Wilke’s mouth, and asked for clear up. That point showed that we always have that problem where we asked for repeat to get it right… I do not see that happen again ever since.

At one point, surprises me that she can read-lips at night with less lights, like inside the car, or outside at night, which is even more difficult for any one (including me).

As the show goes through, I am starting to see that the Daphne is pretty strong hard of hearing or really close to being a hearing. Probably that helps her to understand the conversation with her friends, or people at school, although the background noise can infer her.

At the same time, I asked the hearing friends of mine who does watch the show, said her speech is not close to perfection, but it is understandable because of Katie Leclerc’s history, (she turned deaf at 20, and has the ability to speak well.)

As someone who works in a hotel, I have to check in a lot of people, handle requests in person and try to understand a wide variety of people. It’s a given I will have trouble with certain people and those people tend to be those with accents since I do not have great experience understanding those people to which I may resort to the pen and paper route.

What is interesting is Katie Leclerc who plays Daphne has Meniere’s disease which causes loss of hearing and so forth. From what I can tell from watching the show is that she is not profoundly deaf. Without knowing her, I’d put her deafness in the severe range to which her residual hearing is far greater than mine. I have plenty of friends with that level of hearing loss to have an understanding of how well they hear in certain environments. The crux of my argument is the fact she has never said “What” or have asked people to repeat themselves which is something I do a lot of times, and I’m sure Corey does as well with certain people. While it is certainly not fair to shed Katie in this light, I think the producers/writers didn’t pay particular attention to detail on this subject to make a fair sense of what its like to be deaf in environments like what Corey was subjected to in Las Vegas.

I think it would be appropriate for the writers to take a look at this but I won’t expect them too.

While I did point out earlier the need to suspend our belief because this show has been written to entertain, the writers have apparently forgotten what made the show original was how it portrayed certain aspects of Deaf culture in a realistic light.

Hearing viewers will think little of these changes but we all notice there is very little sign language being used in recent episodes and Daphne has somehow magically transformed into a person who is deaf in label only. Not only is she suddenly an expert speech reader but also she can do so in extreme situations…dark clubs, nighttime conversations outside the home…have you noticed a lot of the scenes take place at night? Nighttime might make for better storytelling but not for us deaf folks who actually need to SEE each other to communicate.

I doubt I’ll be watching this show much longer. It’s like when Jennifer Grey (star of Dirty Dancing) had a nose job some years after the movie. Her original nose made her stand out from amongst the cookie cutter faces. After the surgery many viewers couldn’t recognize her because she looked like “just another” Hollywood face. Like poor Jennifer’s nose, Switched at Birth is being surgically transformed into “just another pretty face.”

You bring up some very interesting points in your comments. I will admit that I agree with you that the show does make it seem as if lip reading is really easy – it really isn’t. I can’t remember exactly who, but someone told me a while back that statistics showed that hearing people were better lip readers than deaf people. It would be great if the show focused on this a bit more – nonetheless, don’t forget that the likely majority of people watching the show are hearing people and there needs to be an entertainment factor with the show.

With respect to Emmett, I agree with you that he is a good kid. He’s going through the normal teenage phase in which he is looking to push his boundaries and gain his independence. I think we’ll find out more in the next few episodes the direction Emmett will take all across the board.

Thank you,

Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator

You bring up a very interesting thought; however, the last thing I want to start is a discussion on whether deaf/hard of hearing people are more open of sex/drug jokes and references than those of hearing people. I say this because I do not want to ascertain either group of this ‘stereotype.’

Nonetheless, thank you for your comment and I look forward to your thoughts in response to future blog posts.

Thank you,

Corey Axelrod
Purple Communications – Digital Marketing Coordinator