Your Case Will Be Heard Now: Deaf People and the Influence of an Accommodation.

How does the accommodation shape the experience a deaf person has when interacting with the court of law? The Americans With Disabilities Act outlined the conditions when a reasonable accommodation must be provided to people with disabilities in hopes to equalize access, however, there has been little discussion of the impact of the accommodation on the outcome of a given encounter. Using a convenience and snowball sampling technique, I interviewed 12 deaf people who had interactions with the court of law to document their experiences. All of them talked about their experiences with getting and using an accommodation. The preferred accommodation by all of the informants was a Sign Language interpreter. In this study, I discuss the experiences the informants had with Sign Language interpreters and how the use of an accommodation influenced their experience. The findings suggest deaf people have agency as social actors and laws that focus on accommodations only address part of the dilemma that are faced by deaf people. A larger problem is the dominant paradigm in the United States that categorizes deaf people as disabled and unable to assist in designing their everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]