This company’s mission is to make the world accessible to Deaf people. It all started at Berkeley’s Big Ideas Contest
By Oliver Haug
Growing up as the only hearing child in an all-Deaf family — a circumstance he says is rarer than being struck by lightning twice — Thibault Duchemin was always translating. From phone calls to doctor’s appointments, he often served as the de facto bridge between his parents and sister and the hearing world. That’s something he says a lot of CODAs (children of deaf adults) end up doing, since live interpreters can be prohibitively expensive.
“At the time, there was just no solution available, if you wanted to understand what the doctor is saying. You had to pay for an interpreter, and sometimes it’s really expensive,” Duchemin told UC Berkeley News. “And that’s in France, right? So that’s not even a developing country, in which things might be more difficult. Obviously I’d get really upset about it. I’d think, there’s so many better ways we can make things happen.”
Duchemin was particularly angered by how the inaccessibility of daily life to Deaf people impacted his younger sister Pauline. Pauline, who is two years younger, struggled to make friends in schools with hearing children, often finding herself at the periphery of social interactions, unable to follow along despite her ability to lip read. Large group conversations with overlapping speakers were just too difficult to follow.
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Original Article by Oliver Huag at UC Berkeley News