A group of researchers have devised a method which allows people to communicate over a 2G cell phone network using Sign Language. This is a pretty big step for deaf folks, because text messaging is a poor substitute for the expressiveness of Sign Language, and for many who have been deaf since childhood, English is truly a foreign language.
Cameron Moll sent me an article from A List Apart on Deafness and the User Experience. I found the explanation of the difference between Deaf and deaf quite interesting. However, I think the most valuable piece of advice the author gave is to write clearly.
Font style and size, page layout, graphic choice and placement, and all the other elements which are traditionally the meat of design are useless if your page isn’t written clearly. Good writing all too often is given much too low a priority in the design process. Yet I submit that it is just as important as any other aspect of design, and perhaps even more important.