August 22nd, 2011
Some of you guys watched me putting flat colours on this at the livestream thing with me and some friends, which is now conveniently recorded in case you wish to relive our occasionally horrifying conversations. :D
As always, you can vote for the pencils/inks/initial colouring that went into the making of this page!
Vote Incentive for This Comic.
Oh neat! This is cool info. Tareth's speaking is actually intended to be very clean, though! She has a pretty strong accent but not much else, which I decided to show with a font change rather than spelling things out in her dialect. :3
I don't often try to find celebrity voices for my characters, but I did for Tareth -- Heather Whitestone is the closest deaf celebrity voice I could find to how I imagine her sounding. Deanne Bray is closer in terms of actual voice, but her accent seems too clean for Tarri.
I do not actually know that many deaf celebrities, though, so there might be a better example out there!
posted at 5:06pm on August 22nd, 2011
We looked on YouTube but couldn't find anything that was suitable. A good reference might be the movie "Children of a Lesser God" with Richard Drifus and Marly Matland.
Celebrities are coached so they are not the best example of deaf speach but they maybe appropriate for a hearing audiences that has never heard deaf speech. You would get to many letters from the grammer nazi's.
If you would like to know more my wife who is hard of hearing also has a masters degree in deaf ed. Feel free to email us. She doesn't read web comics much but I do. She loves teaching people about the deaf.
posted at 10:33pm on August 23rd, 2011
Hm! I don't think it'd be fair to say I need to dumb it down for hearing audiences, so to speak, but I do think that lots of dialect/misspelling of words can be distracting for a major character, whether you're familiar with the accent in question or not.
The important thing for Tareth really isn't understanding EXACTLY what her voice sounds like; it is understanding that her voice is different, so that is all I've chosen to convey.
posted at 1:32am on August 24th, 2011
Very true, For that matter the profoundly deaf don't talk and when they do it's not understandable.
One thing they do that you can use in your art is that signing involves the complete body not just the hands. Face and Body gesters are just as important as the sign.
posted at 11:25am on August 24th, 2011
Actually, that's not always true. I'm profoundly deaf and while I have a slight deaf accent, I speak clearly. In multiple languages, even. Also, saying "they do" and "they don't" is pretty generalizing and reductive. Deaf accents aren't always indicative of hearing level or level of deafness of ability to speak, after all. Just wanted to put that on the record.
posted at 9:34pm on August 7th, 2013
Comment is awaiting moderation.
posted at 12:17am on October 3rd, 2023
Comment by MJ
Taneth is speaking go cleanly. You might need to do that for your hearing readers but the deaf tend to leave off the S and T sounds. The also leave out words like 'did' and 'to' or "What you do your hands"
posted at 12:28pm on August 22nd, 2011