A picture is worth a thousand words

For nearly a million Americans, using a normal telephone is impossible.

For our nation's deaf, finding easy ways to communicate throught the channels the rest of us take for granted has been a constant challenge -- but that's changing. High speed internet has made new video conferencing tools possible, opening new and exciting doors of dialogue. Take it from Sam Wilder, a Sign langauage teacher in Georgia:

"The video phone is much more personal," he said. "And for a lot of deaf people, American Sign Language is their first language and English is hard for them so typing was hard. This uses their language."

"They love the technology," he said.

"It's a great service that the library can provide to the deaf community," he said. "They can communicate with friends and family face to face. There's not a large number of deaf people in the area but there are people here who have deaf friends and family members they want to talk to."

The promise of this new technology is mainly limited by accessibility to high speed internet. Only a small portion of deaf Americans have the internet accessibility needed to use these new technologies.

Video phones help deaf, hearing impaired communicate