Katawa Shoujo Forums

I can’t believe I am having to explain to you people why a congenitally blind person like Lilly would find it supremely difficult if not impossible to learn a visual language.

She can’t see a visual language.

Hands-on signing is most often used by people who were deaf and have become blind (frequently through Usher’s Syndrome) who have a fluency in sign language. They know the handshapes and movements so well because they grew up sighted and using sign language. With Usher’s, your field of vision shrinks down to a pinhole and potentially will be gone altogether in future. Hands on, the receptive partner holds the expressive partner’s wrists in their field of vision (we simulated this using special glasses) and feels the shapes and movements and, BECAUSE THEY ALREADY KNOW SIGN LANGUAGE, are able to understand what is being said to them. They will then respond using sign normally, since the other person is almost certainly going to be sighted.

Lilly can hear, so she would communicate verbally, and read books using a system like Braille. She would have no reason to try and learn sign language to the level of fluency required to communicate effectively with hands-on signing (what I think Atario meant by a method involving two hands) because she would never need to use it. Different priorities, right? The tactile fingerspelling she’s using with Shizune is quick to learn and once you get good at it, you are tapping multiple letters a second. It's an ideal method to use for then to talk back and forth.

I didn't say that she would learn it, just that she would understand the concept.

Notguest wrote:I didn't say that she would learn it, just that she would understand the concept.

Exactly. I especially took umbrage at the following:

metalangel wrote:she wouldn't have the background in a visual language like sign to be able to understand it by movement.

Yeah, it would take longer to learn, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't be able to learn hand-over-hand. Otherwise, I agree that tactile fingerspelling would be much preferred (and is the method they use in Developments).

What is there to take umbrage at? I never said she couldn't understand movement, I said she wouldn't know sign well enough to understand it just by feeling its movements.

metalangel wrote:What is there to take umbrage at? I never said she couldn't understand movement, I said she wouldn't know sign well enough to understand it just by feeling its movements.

Yes, but there seemed to be an implication that she's not capable of understanding such movement because she's blind, which would obviously be untrue. If you're saying that the only obstacle is the lack of having already learned the language, then yeah, obviously, and I apologize for my misinterpretation, but I don't see it as particularly germane.

I did mention having tried hands-on signing and other forms of tactile signing, and that I was checking over my intervenor (deafblind equivalent of an interpreter) literature from the intervenor course I was in at college. You can imagine why I'm a bit blown away you and others concluded I was that ignorant to say what you thought I did.

But whatever. Let's drop it.

Why does Shizune hate Lilly?

I think the better question would be "why does she need glasses if she's deaf?".

think about it OP

To me, it's more of a pride/public perception issue. In her route, she did realise that she had pushed Lily away, but was too stubborn to admit it in public or to apologise to her.