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Resources For Writing Deaf, Mute, or Blind Characters

Despite the fact that I am not deaf, mute, or blind myself, one of the most common questions I receive is how to portray characters with these disabilities in fiction.

As such, I’ve compiled the resources I’ve accumulated (from real life deaf, mute, or blind people) into a handy masterlist.

Deaf Characters:

Deaf characters masterpost

Deaf dialogue thread

Dialogue with signing characters (also applies to mute characters.)

A deaf author’s advice on deaf characters

Dialogue between deaf characters

Mute Characters

Life as a Mute

My Silent Summer:  Life as a Mute

What It’s Like Being Mute

21 People Reveal What It’s Really Like To Be Mute

I am a 20 year old Mute, ask me anything at all!

Blind Characters:

The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Blind Characters.

@referenceforwriters masterpost of resources for writing/playing blind characters.

The youtube channel of the wonderful Tommy Edison, a man blind from birth with great insight into the depiction of blind people and their lives.

An Absolute Write thread on the depiction of blind characters, with lots of different viewpoints and some great tips.

And finally, this short, handy masterpost of resources for writing blind characters.

Characters Who Are Blind in One Eye

4 Ways Life Looks Shockingly Different With One Eye

Learning to Live With One Eye

Adapting to the Loss of an Eye

Adapting to Eye Loss and Monocular Vision

Monocular Depth Perception

Deaf-Blind Characters

What Is It Like To Be Deafblind?

Going Deaf and Blind in a City of Noise and Lights

Deaf and Blind by 30

Sarita is Blind, Deaf, and Employed (video)

Born Deaf and Blind, This Eritrean American Graduated Harvard Law School (video)

A Day of a Deaf Blind Person

Lesser Known Things About Being Deafblind

How the Deaf-Blind Communicate

Early Interactions With Children Who Are Deaf-Blind

Raising a DeafBlind Baby

If you have any more resources to add, let me know!  I’ll be adding to this post as I find more resources.

I hope this helps, and happy writing!  <3

this is why the conversation of representation in the media came back up! all these years poc saw white people on screen and now they are seeing THEMSELVES on screen. it’s so important for black people like me and other poc to be seen in the media.

I’m starting to see (yt) ppl complain about authors only writing x black/poc readers… i dont wanna hear nun cuz yall get everything, I don’t wanna read a book where my hair is flowing in the air while i’m talking to miles, bc it WONT. I want fics where we dance together to spanish music or rnb after I braid his hair. Hobie wouldn’t want a basic white person who does basic white person things, thats boring. Hobie would want someone (most likely colored, sry to break it to you) to try to fight for our people in the free time, or where he retwists my locs for me and i help maintain his wicks while listening to slow jams.

Yt people take over every type of media we have. Im not saying not to write x white readers, just be inclusive. And work on your spanglish and aave while ur at it… 😬

I write for the black girls with hella thighs, wide hips and no ass. I see you, I hear you. I am you

Nobody knows how to make an emotional post like Candice on that set. I was seeing and listening to everyone else’s post and I was sad but I was moved to tears with Candice. I grew up with her as my Iris, as one of my Idols, and now next Wednesday I won’t be able to turn on the tv and see her as Iris again.

I’m grateful and happy to have had Candice Patton as my Iris West-Allen. 🫶🏽

Hey hey shout to that character in the new Pixar movie that has an insulin pump

I can’t do this anymore. Someone said Kentaji Brown Jackson being chosen was racial and gender discrimination. Because she was chosen for being a black woman.

You know there needs to be element of power and oppression for discrimination to work right? There has to be an element of someone actively stopping someone from having something for it to be called discrimination. So, unless Jackson or Biden is actively preventing white men or anyone else from ever holding a court position, it’s not discrimination.

I promise ONE black women being selected to the court, won’t prevent anyone else or discriminate from being nominated to the Supreme Court.

The way some people can’t tell the difference between discrimination and choosing someone for more representation and diversity is concerning. Wanting to hire a minority, someone in LGBTQ+ or a women is not discrimination, you are just racist, sexist and transphobic! White people, men and straight people have never been discriminated from holding any position or had to work as hard their minority counterparts to prove themselves. The fact people cant understand that is frustrating.

How bout a motha fucking round of applause for the queen Jodie Turner Smith 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

It's crazy that The Acolyte’s cancellation has sparked important conversations about toxic fandoms and bigotry, and how these issues affect so many shows and films. It shows what many of us have known for a long time—diverse projects often get unfairly punished by studios for upsetting certain YouTubers and racist and misogynistic groups online.

Instead of supporting these fresh and bold stories, studios would rather cave to backlash, leaving unique projects like The Acolyte behind. It highlights the real challenges diverse creators and stories face, and how the industry often fails to stand by them.

Back in the day, shows were given the chance to find their audience with another season, unlike how things are handled in today’s streaming world. I always point to Rings of Power as the perfect example of how not caving to bigots will benefit you. If you stand by the project and its creators, negative backlash won’t hurt the success of the series—it can thrive if the studio just believes in it. And it actually helps listening to the people who support the projects instead of the haters

Omg someone finally said it 👏🏾👏🏾

Every Asexual Character in 2018 YA

Jellyfable

Thought I’d share this for anyone who wants more asexual characters in their reading this year. I’m ecstatic to see Our Bloody Pearl included in this list, and I can’t wait to check out some of the other titles.

| DARKSKIN WOMEN |

I saw this comment in a discussion of Saw X, and I am about to pass out.

This is so important, I'm so glad you have this. As a librarian I talk about how important representation is, and yet I was still blindsided when something similar happened to me. I'm Disgrapic which is like dyslexia. I've had a long time to accept and be comfortable with this part of my identity, I've had a lot of support. I see stories of boy s struggling in school, who have learning disabilities, who hate school and I'm glad kids have representation, but I never connected with these stories and didn't think I needed to. Then Annabeth Chase came along. She is a girl, she loves learning, she is the smart one and she Can't Spell. It was like a punch to the gut in the best possible way. I didn't know much i needed that until it happened.

I’ve kind of been hanging out, watching the discourse re: Neil Gaiman at al. pertaining to Good Omens and their extratextual interactions, and there’s been a lot said by a lot of people, and I want to add my own voice here, shine a light on my own perspective in case it might help anyone else.

I’ve spent well over half an hour at work today, crying my eyes out. I saw the tweet from Michael Sheen saying that he would unashamedly engage with the soft, joyous fan community, and another post here by Gaiman talking about the freedom of interpretation of his work and his refusal to tell us what to think, and for a little while, it just overwhelmed me with happiness.

For a very long time, or at least for as much time as I can remember, I haven’t faced any particular focused discriminations for my (a)sexuality. I’ve seen the discourse here and there, I’ve seen people that are nasty human beings lashing out unnecessarily at my people, and I’ve had the odd comment here or there (but not more than any other thing people come tell me off about). I know that this sort of active discrimination exists and happens often, but my personal experience has been fairly peaceful. My partner is aware of it, my friends are aware of it, my family is aware of it, my followers and readers are (usually, mostly) aware that I am ace. It’s just something that exists, like having hands. No one really comes to me to tell me my hands are a problem, but also no one ever really comes to tells me my hands are good, either, you know? It’s been the same thing, for me.

I have, in my lifetime, seen I think one ace person that was acknowledged as asexual on TV- one of the girls in the brief ambulance team sitcom Sirens. I know there are others, a small handful of them out there, but that’s the only one I’ve seen. I’ve seen headcanons about so-and-so being ace, but most of them haven’t really rang that true for me (not saying at all that people shouldn’t headcanon whatever makes them happy, just that when I watch the same thing, I don’t recognize myself). I haven’t felt its lack (it was definitely lacking, but I haven’t had that bone-deep craving for representation I think a lot of people do have, but give me a moment). The fics I’ve read where there are supposed ace characters, don’t seem to generally be written by ace folks, and often center around the idea of coaxing the ace person into having sex with the right person (sigh), or make the character’s asexuality the focus of the story (which isn’t bad, necessarily, but it’s not what I want, I’ve already paid my dues in the “gays can only have stories about being gay” department and I’m ready to move on).

I say all of this because I want you to know where I am coming from when I say that when I watched Good Omens, I saw myself. Now, I may not be intentionally represented, but what matters to me is that the path was clear enough that I, beyond the shadow of a doubt, felt their story resonate in my bones as true to me and what I wanted to see written about me and people like me. I saw two asexuals hopelessly in love, ready to face down heaven and hell together in order to stay together and to protect everything they loved. And the story was not exclusively or even specifically about their asexuality; they got to be people (sort of?? supernatural people, but still people!!) first and foremost, having this wild adventure together.

Now, you may not have the same impression as me. Maybe you saw a different show when you watched the same thing. I’m not here to argue about that. What you saw is what you saw, what I saw was what I saw.

What I want to lay bare here is that Gaiman has come forward to say that he’s not going to take either of those things away from either one of us. As long as he maintains Death of the Author as his belief system, we both get to look at the same text, take from it what we want and need, and be happy. If he did anything else, confirmed you or me were right, the other would lose something that is possibly very, very important to us. There is no greater gift than the freedom to imagine in this case. On top of that, he and the others have been standing their ground and doing their best to make sure no one ELSE can take that away from us, either. They don’t have to do that, that’s not their job, but they’re doing it anyway. Sheen’s really out there telling people they can fuck off if they want to be mean to us, and that he absolutely wants to and enjoys interacting with the warm joy of fandom.

Listen, I’ve been tolerated all my life. It’s not so bad, once you get used to it, but today, after seeing someone do better, I realized that I have been used to it. And that being used to low-grade pain kind of sucks. Before now I had not understood the idea of craving something like this. No one had ever told me that feeling represented properly on such a major scale could feel this way, or at least I hadn’t understood it if they did. I had never known how badly I was in need of something so healing and good, and I started to understand some of the comments being left on things I had written about these characters. I began to understand that I have, for a very long time, needed something I was unaware even could exist. And now that I know, I am so, so grateful to hear that it won’t be taken away from me.

Today I saw a post from the creator of one of my new favorite things, a thing which I now hold extremely dear to my heart, tell me, tell the world, that however I interpret what I see, whatever happiness I feel because of it, he won’t correct me. He won’t ever tell me I’m wrong because it’s not like that, it’s this other way in his head. I watched him tell me that the way I feel about a thing is more important to him than making sure his way is the only way his work is seen.

And I literally cannot think of a single thing in the entire world more precious or worthy of protecting than that kind of kindness and understanding.

People go on about good healthy queer rep but I cannot express how much I want unhealthily devoted queer rep. Raise your lover from the dead no matter the cost. Kill to get them to safety. Trade your soul for theirs. Die to reunite with them. I want gothic hyper-devotion codependent lovers

My son, who is 4, and I were walking along the street today and saw a man with his left leg amputated beneath the knee. My son spun around and looked at him, then said to me, “That man lost his leg! What happened?”

I said I didn’t know exactly, but sometimes people lost arms or legs through accidents or didn’t have them for other reasons.

My son instantly said, “Gobber (from How to Train Your Dragon) lost his arm AND his leg and now he has to use tools in their places!”

I kind of collected my jaw and said, “That’s right, and that man is just like Gobber. There’s a special word we use for those kinds of tools. It’s ‘prosthetics’.”

"Prosthetics," said my son, with satisfaction, and on we went without any further discussion about it.

But then we got on the bus, and there was a young black woman with her hair pulled back in a big floofy afro ponytail, and my son, who has seen the trailers for the new Annie movie, said, in delight, “She has hair like Annie’s!”

Representation matters.

✨Perfection✨

Supernatural had the opportunity to do something great. To send a message of love and validation to a whole community. Not only to the part of the community that liked their show, but to all of us. But instead they decided to pander to the people, who never had to fight for their representation.

I support #TheySilencedYou, #TheySilencedThem and #TheyWillNeverSilenceUs and I'm in awe of all of you. Of your eloquence, passion, coordination and decisiveness. And I feel like your message goes beyond this particular TV show and the CW.

It's about protesting a pattern of disrespect towards otherness in Mainstream Media. It's about demanding meaningful, unmistakably queer representation, that enables discourse and furthers understanding in a heterogenic Audience. It's about asking Networks to not only hire diverse staff but to also give them the freedom to tell their stories the way they want to. It's about telling creators to own up to the inherent messages they leave us with in the end.

And that's inspiring and should be celebrated.

Stories matter.