Guest post: Alex Kukoff is a 14 year old, half-deaf college student who is looking for a concept design for a pair of closed-captioned glasses in the Eyes to Hear With: Easy to Manufacture CC Glasses Challenge on GrabCAD.
Andrew Solomon is the National Book Award-winning and Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, an activist for LGBT rights, and has lectured at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, MIT, Stanford, and the Library of Congress. In his most recent work, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Solomon explores various disabilities and the impact they have on the affected people, their families, and society as a whole.
In great depth, Solomon explores Deaf (he capitalizes the ‘d’ to refer to deafness as an identity rather than a pathological condition) character, approaching deafness not as a handicap, but as a culture. However, with any culture, there are shades of gray, and Solomon does acknowledge the social ramifications that come with a loss of hearing.
In a recent email to me, he praised GrabCAD's efforts to help ease these trials with a set of closed-captioned glasses for movie theaters. “It’s a brilliant idea -- I think it’s a major innovation,” he says. He encourages our efforts and is “waiting and watching for the glasses to find their way into the world.”
There are only 5 days left of the Challenge; be sure to get your entry in and help the Deaf community!
