My Personal Experience

Learning ASL virtually, on Zoom, I ran into challenges I had not expected. ASL is a language that requires seeing the precise movements of one's hand. This was difficult to do on an online platform prone to glitching and being choppy. I was once in a class where, for a very long portion of the session, my screen was frozen, and I had to review what I had missed by myself later, without the help of my instructor. My experience taking virtual ASL classes gave me just a very small insight into what it must be like to be Deaf during this pandemic. I was able to further that insight by conducting research and interviews with people who are hard of hearing themselves, or have had different experiences with the Deaf community during the pandemic. That research and those interviews can be seen in their own individual pages.