NAD 2020 Vision: Corrective Lens Needed

NAD 2020 Vision is purely about the culturally deaf agenda and nothing more. They have consistently served most of their interest to the side of the culturally deaf community (estimated population 600,000) rather than the deaf and hard of hearing communities at large that make up 98% of all people with hearing loss (est. 35 million). NAD should be titled "NACD" or National Association of the Culturally Deaf because members and staff are culturally deaf.

None of their vision outlines the right of deaf and hard of hearing people to speech and sound. Although they do outline an objective to protect every individual's right to visual communication in the U.S. which can include captioning, Cued Speech, and even Signing in Exact English but that's just a guess because for all we know they probably only support the captioning part (i.e. real time captioning, CART, movie captioning, etc).

The Vision 2020 do not even acknowledge that there are educational programs that combine signing and speech. And what's more they blatantly left out the rights of parents to make an informed decision regarding their children with hearing loss whether it's bilateral or unilateral mild, moderate, severe  or profound hearing loss.

I'd say every child born with a hearing loss has a right to visual communication access which can mean Cued Speech, ASL, SEE, PSE, lipreading, captioning, etc. Just as well there are many children born with both hearing and visual loss that they should have a right to both visual and verbal/sound communication access as well. There are babies born with one of the condition and may gradually lose the other condition such as late deafened or late vision loss. So, in reality every individual's right is to both visual and verbal communication in the U.S. because frankly nobody is born with the exact same condition . NAD's 2020 Vision is purely a culturally deaf agenda promoting only one visual communication access, ASL, as the only acceptable language. There are visual and spoken language that every child born with a hearing loss should have access to. The rest is up to the parents to make an informed decision on what to do for their child.

NAD continues to play the game of political correctness to the whims of culturally deaf people and their ideals.

Videos: Compare and Contrast on Communication Methods and Options

Let's compare with the recent ASL video that came out on what it appears to be (CDE) California Department of Education's official support on the ASL option against all other communication methods and options in an equal unbiased approach on information for parents to watch. Also see the CDE Oversight Committee in the last video below at 12:55 to see the scrolling names. You might recognize some of the names. That alone certainly raise questions about the possibility of conflict of interest. Who is Andrew Laufer?

As far as I can tell there were no budget set aside using California's public tax dollars to produce a video on other communication and language options for parents to learn and be informed about. The budget of $34,000 dollars was used to produce the inspirational ASL video with the intent to distribute DVD videos targeting parents of newborn Deaf or hard of hearing children. It is not known if CDE will include other DVDs, pamphlets or other information about other options along with the distributed ASL DVD video for parents to have. Is that their intent? Or just the ASL video only?

I have a question for you CDE, are other options being denied to parents who need to know all other options in order to make an informed decision regarding their deaf/hh newborn child? Is this the only DVD video available for those parents that talks expressly only on ASL? Do you have other communication options to provide and show? Do you have plans to make other similar videos about Cued Speech? Signing Exact English? Audio-Verbal approaches? And so on?


Auditory-oral approach on learning how to speak and improve listening skill.


Cued speech with auditory-oral examples along with sign language using Cuers.


A deaf/hh boy with hearing aid learning how to speak and listen fluently in both the English and Cantonese language through auditory-oral approach with his mother.


A mother and deaf/hh son (with a cochlear implant) moment with her signing in SEE and him responding in SEE which is a full visual communication access of the English language while at the same time hear exactly the spoken English language.


California Department of Education's ASL video of parents and kids signing only.