Today is the first day of Team Dad. After ten months of maternity leave, my Wife has returned to her part-time job, and due to the cost of childcare, we’ve decided that from now on, for three days a week, I’m going to be looking after Toddler and Baby.

I already knew my Wife was good at juggling the feeding, changing, caring, washing, and bathing. But now I recognise her total genius. Because what no-one tells you about childcare is that past changing a nappy, every job is ridiculously easy. The trouble is there’s just so many of them.

Take getting the kids up in the morning. Fundamentally, they just need to be fed and changed. Sounds simple. But for that, you need to cook their porridge while changing their nappies while running upstairs to find their clean clothes while cleaning the bibs you forgot to clean the night before while getting them a drink and ultimately, completely forgetting to have breakfast yourself.

Those are the issues I might have anticipated. What I didn’t know is that on waking them up, I’d find Baby’s nappy had leaked, soaking her clothes and bed. I also didn’t expect them to so vehemently resist eating their food – Toddler because she wanted me to read Jack and the Beanstalk, Baby because she was more interested in banging her spoon on her feeding tray as though it were a drum.

After I’d swept the floor clean of crumbs of toast, we got to playgroup an hour late. I saw that as a major achievement. Then Toddler wet herself just as we were about to leave, and again once we got home. Three months of potty training wiped out in one morning.

In the afternoon, there was respite. Baby had a nap, Toddler played happily in her new indoor tent, and I sat down with the paper and a cuppa.

Then, a smell. And not one filled with the kind of pleasant notes identified by wine experts. After dragging toddler out of the tent and into her fourth set of clean clothes, there was a cry from upstairs. Baby was awake. Defeated, I poured my cold cup of tea away.

In the evening, after I’d swept the floor again – this time because of a constellation of cake crumbs – my Wife arrived home and asked how the day had been. “Hectic,” I said. She replied only with a knowing smile.

Three years ago, I became a father for the first time and with feeding times and the general chaos of life-change, I suddenly found it harder than ever to get to the cinema for one of the few subtitled screenings. Which is, all in all, a bit of a problem for a scriptwriter.

Additionally, I found that the subtitled films I could get myself to were Hollywood blockbusters, rather than the art-house fare I usually watch (ok, ok. I’m a snob. I admit it).

I’d also noticed that most of the regular events for deaf people in London and elsewhere revolved – in some way – around drinking. Deaf pub and club meets, new years eve bashes, and so on. There seemed to be a gap for a regular night where deaf people could meet, hand-wag for a bit, take in some culture, then chat about it afterwards. We could still have a drink – it just wouldn’t be the main focus of the evening.

So, with my own need to temporarily escape parenthood for the occasional film, and deaf people in the capital needing a regular cultural night out, the London Subtitled Cinema Group was born. My thinking was that if enough of us got together, we could persuade a cinema chain to put on subtitled screenings especially for us. You can hope can’t you?

Well, somehow it worked. After one failed approach with another cinema, I got a positive response from the Curzon Cinema group, who by chance had a member of staff with a deaf granddaughter, and as a consequence, really understood what a deaf group would need.

After a few meetings – where I persuaded them to offer us discounted tickets, and they in turn told me more about the practicalities of getting distributors to provide subtitles for films – we were soon booked in to see Where The Wild Things Are, just before Christmas 2009. In truth, the film was a disappointment for anyone who remembers the children’s book, but around 25 people came, proving that there was demand for the group, and everyone got on famously.

Since then we’ve seen 15 films, with highlights including The Secret in Their Eyes, A Prophet, and most recently Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. Between 20-30 people attend each screening, with the record group attendance being the 40 members who came to see The Social Network.

There is one main group rule. It’s for deafies only – though the members are very welcome to bring hearing friends and family along.  The best thing about the group is the friendships that have developed. I’ve gone on to work with several of the group members, and I’m proud to report (Cilla Black style) that we even have a group romance – between two members who met after we saw a very strange Greek film called Dogtooth.

Recently, I’ve heard about another cinema group which has been set up in the north-east, by Paul Terry. His group is attended mainly by hearing people, but go to subtitled screenings because they have a deaf member.

What’s clear is that when a group of people get together, it’s much easier to get cinemas to agree to provide subtitles. He told me “getting numbers up means we can start requesting specific movies, perhaps older, foreign, limited release and subtitled movies for the club to enjoy. I’m also hoping that technology will soon be at a point where deaf people can come along and enjoy movies with us without having to put on a specifically subtitled movie.”

When it comes to demanding better provision for cinema access, what better way of persuading cinemas to show films with subtitles than demonstrating that there’s a big demand for it?

So if you’re looking for a project this new year, why not set up a cinema group in your area? It’s a great way of bringing people together, and you might just see a subtitled film that’ll stay in your mind for life.

For more information on the London Subtitled Cinema Group, or if you’d like any tips on setting up your own group, just go to: http://londonsubtitledcinemagroup.wordpress.com/  or email subtitledcinemagroup@gmail.com

In my spare time, I’m rarely far away from my camera, and since my children came along I’ve become a man possessed by the need to capture every stage in their development!

I enjoy photography so much that I’ve taken several evening courses to develop my skills, and I’ve since gone on to photograph a family wedding, a local pre-school’s children, and a local family.

The site’s still a work in progress but you can take a gander here. Hope you like the images!

Matt Daigle is a deaf cartoonist, designer and illustrator who lives in California. He and his wife produce a hilarious comic strip called That Deaf Guy, about a deaf man who, like Matt, has a hearing wife and son. The strip is laugh-out-loud funny, original, and true to deaf life. They recently picked up thousands of fans after becoming a hit on Facebook, so I thought it’d be a good time to interview the man himself and find out more about his life, family and work.

What inspired you to become a cartoonist?
I started drawing cartoons as a kid. Being born deaf, cartoons communicated to me at a time when television and other media were not accessible. Then when I was 12, my mom took me to an exhibition by Gary Larson (creator of cartoon strip The Far Side) at the Smithsonian Museum and I was hooked for life!

Where did the idea for That Deaf Guy come from?
The idea came from my wife! She is hearing and has always been a big fan of my cartooning. We were on the way to a cartoon festival in Missouri when the idea came to her. I am the artist but my wife is the writer. We knew that in order to go more mainstream, we needed to incorporate humor and language that crossed two cultures, so it is a hearing/deaf collaboration. We both come up with ideas and aim to find a happy medium. If the humor is too deaf, hearing people will not understand it and vice versa!

What’s the response to That Deaf Guy been like?
The response has been surprising and inspiring. It was online for a year and literally no one knew about us. Then we hired a marketing person who has deaf parents. He told us we had to get on Facebook and within a week we had over 1,000 fans. We were jumping up and down when we had 200!! Now a month later we have nearly 3000 fans. We love the idea of our comic strip creating a forum for people to talk about their experiences and laugh a little.

Do you have a favourite That Deaf Guy story – and if so, why?
It’s really hard to say which one is my favorite. Many of them are based on our lives with our son and on my own deaf experiences, so each one is special or funny to me in different ways. I do get a kick out of the ‘Be Deaf-Wise’ strips because I think they educate in a funny way.

Is That Deaf Guy published anywhere, or just online?
That Deaf Guy is published in SIGNews – a newspaper in America for the signing community. It has also been published in several books that relate to deaf culture and of course, we have our webcomic. I really want the strip to go more mainstream. I think that there is so much more we can feature. Deaf stories aren’t always about oppression and lack of access. Many of us live successful lives and I would like to show that version by becoming nationally syndicated, publish books, and even take the concept to prime time television.

Tell us about your home life. You have a son – how do you combine your career and being a Dad?
I work with my wife on That Deaf Guy so I love having time with her to be creative but when it comes to my son I really have to balance my life so that I don’t one day turn around and he is grown up and I missed everything! My wife is a VRS interpreter and works late at night. I work from home, so we are both here during the day. We make it our motto to create everyday. Our creations can be hours of writing or drawing That Deaf Guy or it can be an hour of constructing something out of Play Doh!

To see more That Deaf Guy comic strips, go to http://www.thatdeafguy.com/
You can check out Matt’s website by going to http://www.mattdaigle.com/
Follow Matt on Twitter: http://twitter.com/deafcartoonist

At 11am on Redcar beach, 500 crazy Teesiders jumped into the freezing North Sea cheered on by ten times that number. The upside? Nearly £80,000 raised for charity. The downside? Witnessing the tight-fitting mankinis on show. Here’s my pics.

An incredible article by investigative journalist James Ridgeway for America’s Mother Jones magazine uncovers the story of Felix Garcia, a profoundly deaf Cuban American who was imprisoned in 1983 for a crime his brother has since confessed to.

Garcia, from Florida, has so far spent nearly thirty years of his life behind bars. Ridgeway uncovers not only the vulnerability of a deaf prisoner (Garcia has been “ignored or taunted by guards, raped and brutalized by other prisoners” he writes) but also how little Garcia understood of the original court case which determined his fate.

Ridgeway writes that Garcia “was given a hearing aid, which he said didn’t work, and a loudspeaker, which amplified noise but didn’t help him understand what people were saying. He tried to read lips, but the prosecutor often faced away from him, and he had no clear view of the witness box. In other words, he was largely clueless as to what was going on.” Garcia told the paralegal called Pat Bliss who has supported his case since 1996 that the reason he answered “yes” to so many questions in court was because he didn’t want to look “stupid.”

It transpires that Garcia’s brother made a deal with the authorities in order to avoid the death penalty. Over twenty years later, he admitted in court that his brother had nothing to do with the original crime, but despite this, Garcia remains in prison.

Having been punished for a crime he did not commit, Garcia then faced what could be described as a double sentence (which is also, as it happens, the name of a play by Deafinitely Theatre about a deaf prisoner) of being a prisoner in a system that made no provision for deafness.

Ridgeway uncovers how US prisons have no records of how many deaf prisoners there are, and how legislation for people with disabilities is routinely ignored, which leaves deaf prisoners completely powerless and excluded – without access to training that could help them prepare for a life outside, general information (simple things such as calling out mealtimes) or entertainment (televisions without captions, for example). That’s without mentioning the brutal treatment they can face.

Much of what Ridgeway outlines in the article is also true here in the UK.

In 2007, I worked on a BBC2 special for the deaf programme See Hear about deaf prisoners. We worked with The Deaf Prison Project to research our programme, and were surprised to find (like in the US) that that there were no statistics on the number of deaf prisoners in the UK.

The main focus of the programme became a deaf prisoner who had spent many years in prison and had been freed only a few years earlier. He was interviewed anonymously. Like Garcia, he told us he was unable to understand his trial – and upon being found guilty, the length of his sentence.

He reported being treated brutally by the guards in the prison. The biggest problem with being deaf, he said, was not hearing the guards speaking to him. If he asked them what they had said, it was seen as answering back, while if he didn’t hear them at all, they would presume he had ignored them. Either way, he would receive physical abuse in response.

The former prisoner had (as with Garcia) spent time in solitary confinement, in this case because he was diagnosed as being mentally ill after reporting hearing sounds in his head. He suffered immensely for this, but the sounds he had heard were, incredibly, later found to result from his tinnitus.

What became clear is that any problems a deaf person could be faced with in the outside world were magnified in a captive environment. Access did not seem to be anywhere on the list of priorities, and the Disability Discrimination Act (now the Disability and the Equality Act) didn’t seem to exist.

Our contributor seemed scarred by the experience, and only took part in hope that speaking about what had happened to him would help reduce the chances of it happening to anyone else.

Let’s hope that James Ridgeway’s article helps make more people aware of the problems deaf prisoners face, and above all, that Felix Garcia, who seems to be the victim of an extraordinary deception, finally finds justice.

But before jumping into a career where we spend our days differentiating the grimaces of smugglers carrying a bellyful of cocaine-filled condoms from those of passengers who’ve had one too many vodkas to calm their pre-flight nerves, let’s not limit ourselves. There’s a whole range of jobs we can target our newly updated CVs at, and here are just a few of them…

Poker player. Since deafies have a natural ability to spot ‘tells,’ its time for us to stop playing one another in deaf-only tournaments (cancelling out our natural advantage) and start hustling hearing tournaments instead. Look out, Victoria Coren.

Bodyguard. Looking for someone who can block out all extraneous noise and spot that shifty assassin with gun in hand, only a trigger pull away from inspiring another Oliver Stone biopic? Deaf bodyguard is your man. If you book him an interpreter, he’ll even make like Kevin Costner and sweet-talk Whitney Houston after. Though whether he’d take a bullet for a hearing guy is a whole other question.

Pre-marriage counsellor. Who needs long sessions with a priest, or a pre-nup for that matter, when your deaf body language expert can tell you – after just a few moments in your company – whether your prospective spouse is in it for love or money? Special rates for former members of the Beatles.

Interpreter. For hearing people. For years, deaf people have employed hearing interpreters to translate verbal communication into sign, so it seems only fair that we give something back*. Whether you’re a confused hearing arts critic at a mime fest, or a hearing boss working out from non-verbal cues which candidate to give a job to – deaf ‘terps’ are ready to step in and make sense of the visual world for you. (*Subject to a £100 an hour charge and a minimum 3 hour booking time, with breaks every twenty minutes and no refund at all for cancellations.)

With kids in bed and hot cuppas in hand, we sat down at 9pm to watch the show, only to find, as the show began, that we wanted to deliver the “You’re fired” line to Lord Sugar and the BBC, instead.

All because the programme was transmitted with live subtitles. What this meant was that the lines of text we rely on to understand what’s being said in the show (since we’re both partially deaf) appeared on screen a good 5-10 seconds behind the dialogue.

Like the adult version of the show, Young Apprentice is quickly edited, full of one-liners and people speaking over one another, all in the name of producing pacy, dramatic telly.

So what deaf and hard of hearing people were watching throughout the final was, more often than not, subtitles appearing from the scene before the one we were watching. Here’s a video we made shortly after the start of the programme to show what it’s like:

What we should have been watching is pre-recorded subtitles, which are, (as the name suggests) prepared in advance, appearing on screen exactly in time with speech. Live subtitles meanwhile, are (also as the name suggests) usually used on live programmes, such as the news, sporting events, or live shows like the X-Factor.

They’re made as it happens, often through speech recognition, which is why they appear with a few seconds delay (and occasionally carry unfortunate willy-related mistakes).

They’re far from ideal, but (while they could be improved) on live shows there’s no alternative. What stings is when a show is clearly pre-recorded, as the Young Apprentice Final was, yet a decision is made for it to carry live subtitles.

On Twitter there were dozens of complaints. Ian Noon said “What about fair access to deaf young people?” Tyron Woolfe said ” Deaf People sick of this, live subtitling does not work, we are getting everything 20 seconds later…. its PATHETIC,”  while Martine Monksfield said: “disappointing re. live subtitles on #youngapprentice which means deafies 10seconds behind = lost. Turned over!”

Pre-recorded subtitles need to be delivered to a subtitler in advance of the show being transmitted. So what’s the BBC’s excuse? Were last minute editing changes made to the show that stopped this happening? Or were they worried that by passing on a tape of the final to a subtitling company, the name of the winner might leak out?

The bigger question is whether, at any point in the process, anybody stopped to consider the effect further down the line on deaf members of the audience, which add up to one in six of the show’s potential viewers?

I’m so annoyed that I still don’t know who won. Did James come through? Or Zara? I’m sure I’ll find out eventually, but not in the way I was supposed to. The only bright spot was when I found out (thanks to Sally Reynolds) that the subtitles displayed ‘Lord Chugger’ at one point. Small consolation, but it brought a smile to my face.