Deaf servants were favored companions of the sultan.

In the 1600s, some 40 deaf servants were employed by the Ottoman court in Constantinople, writes Amelia Soth in JSTOR Daily.

They were specifically chosen because of their deafness. These servants were favored companions of the sultan; their facility in nonverbal communication made them indispensable to the court, because decorum restricted speech in the sultan’s presence. 

The deaf attendants taught pages to communicate through signs. A European observer, Ottaviano Bon, wrote that “both the Grand Signor, and divers that are about him, can reason, and discourse with the Mutes of any thing: as well and as distinctly, alla Mutescha, by nods and signes, as they can with words.”

Silence and seclusion were a way to express the sultan’s majesty to his people and to visitors from foreign countries.

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Study finds autism 30 times more common among blind people.

​As a child neurologist, Ruben Jure treats children with developmental disabilities including autism.

As director of the Centro Privado de Neurología y Neuropsicología Infanto-Juvenil Wernicke in Argentina, he writes in Spectrum News that every year he sees at least one blind child who shows the full clinical manifestations of autism.

He decided to investigate the relationship between autism and blindness, and although the study was small, he writes, "it indicated that autism is more than 30 times as common in blind people as in sighted people."

"Other work from my team suggests this relationship is specific to vision," he writes. "Hearing impairment is not strongly connected to autism."

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ASL is now the third most commonly taught language at U.S. colleges.

For the first time, ASL is being offered at Cornell University, meeting its three-semester world language requirement, the Cornell Chronicle reports.

ASL came to Cornell after a lobbying effort by the student-run Cornell University Deaf Awareness Project.

In 2018 the faculty changed its definition of “language” to include signed languages, and that allowed ASL to fulfill the foreign language requirement.

According to the Modern Language Association, ASL is now the third most commonly taught language at colleges and universities (other than English), after Spanish and French. 

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Don't let them miss out on holiday fun.

If your holiday list includes kids or adults who are blind or visually impaired, it can be hard to find appropriate gifts.

New York State's Central Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (CABVI) is ready to help.

CABVI Rehabilitation Employment Supervisor Laura Yakey recently shared some suggestions with Spectrum News: "Tactile games in braille like Sorry, large print cards, bingo, Connect Four, audible balls that make noise for kids to play outside," she recommends.

"Think of all the adaptive equipment and games and activities available to them so they can enjoy the holidays just like everybody else."

​If you’re interested in buying games or toys, CABVI suggests Connect Four for patterning, tracking and scanning; Tic-Tac-Toe for tracking, scanning, and matching; magnetic balls, and glow worms.

Amazon has a list of appropriate gifts for blind and visually impaired kids that you can find here.

​And CABVI has its own online catalog of gifts for all ages here.

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Help us honor this new tradition!

You've shopped till you dropped. You've obsessed over your holiday gift list. 

Now it's time to think about giving back. At LSH, we're hoping some of you will mark this day with a gift that will restore the precious gifts of sight and hearing for needy people in your communities. 

If you'd like to do that, please click here.

But no matter which charity you choose, we encourage you to be generous on this special day.

Learning sign language can lead to a career.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a high demand for American Sign Language interpreters, according to Texas Tech's Daily Toreador, and demand will continue to grow by 19 percent from 2018 to 2028.

Staff writer Graciela Vasquez quotes John Hill, a deaf ASL instructor at Texas Tech: “There’s a high demand for fluent ASL interpreters. For my doctorate, I am currently working on my dissertation, which focuses on the high demand of interpreters and how qualified interpreters impact deaf children in K-12 settings.”

“There are a lot of perks that come with a person who is fluent in ASL," according to Hill.

Hill says it takes five to seen years of study to become truly fluent in ASL.

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