My name is Levi Traxler and I was born Deaf. As a father with two amazing kids, I am quickly revisiting some of my childhood memories and I realized I had missed not only information but also context, humor, and shared experiences with my family. Thankfully, the world is more accessible nowadays for language. Technology has improved dramatically, but meaningful language access still depends on making communication fully accessible at home, school, and in everyday life. Revisiting these memories with full language access has completely changed how I understand them.
When I was a child, my family liked to watch movies together. That was during the time period when most movies didn’t come with subtitles, and the TV captioning system wasn’t reliable. Captioning often didn’t work for many movies. Recently, I sat down and rewatched some movies that my family and I watched as a child, and I realized I had missed out on so many things. For example, in the movie Jumanji, released in 1995, a man in the movie asked a boy to go get an axe from a shed. The boy goes outside, notices the shed is locked with a padlock, looks around and finds an axe lying around on the ground next nearby. He picks it up and starts hacking away at the padlock, and only after a moment does he realize he’s already holding an axe and runs back to the man. I remember my family, especially my father, laughing at this moment but I didn’t get it. I felt a bit left out, and I didn’t want to intrude on my family’s moment. I didn’t get it because I didn’t know what the man said to the boy, so an important context was missed. This time I watched it with subtitles and it made a lot more sense now.
Watching movies made me realize how much incidental learning I missed as a child. Hearing children often learn naturally from dialogue, jokes, tone, and conversations happening around them. Without reliable access to language, many of those moments passed by me without context. At the time, I didn’t even realize I was missing them because nobody around me realized it either.
There are plenty of situations where I looked back and realized I missed out on something. I still vividly remember my father watching a lot of deadpan comedy, and I did not get at least ninety-nine percent of the jokes. I also recall most of my family gathering together to watch Saturday Night Live, laughing at plenty of jokes related to real-world situations that I wasn’t aware of, or watching Jeopardy!, where I felt left out because it was fast paced with so much dialogue, and captioning didn’t work well.
It made me think I also missed out on so many conversations with anyone who didn’t sign, because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Especially jokes! Jokes rely on timing and delivery to make it work well with the audience. I also realized that many English jokes do not translate well into ASL, and vice versa.
Looking back at these memories helped me realize how important accessible language truly is for Deaf and hard of hearing children. Language access is not only about understanding words. It is also about sharing laughter, stories, emotions, and everyday moments with the people around you. Children deserve to be not only physically included, but also fully included in those family moments and memories.
