Gosh. So, 3 - can you read? is offensive? I read a great article (which I can't find, of course) on some website a while ago, and it was about how people in the deaf communities don't trust "hearies" and ignored AIDS literature because they believed it to be a hearie conspiracy. I found that TIME did an article in 1994 on it, though, and that has proved useful. > Why should a deaf person be more vulnerable to the 20th century plague than a blind person or, for that matter, the average American? The answer, say deaf activists, is that their peers do not read English. The first language of more than half of America's deaf, whose number is variously estimated at between 250,000 and 2 million, is American Sign Language (ASL). Half of the deaf in America don't (or didn't, in 1994) read english? So I guess that's a pretty good question, considering it's a coinflip. edit: I found the article! http://poz.com/articles/226_1609.shtml