How vlogging is empowering a new generation of stutterers | Hacker News Reader

How vlogging is empowering a new generation of stutterers

catapult.co

34 pointsnotoriousarun17 comments

So today in my 40s I learned that these pauses I sometimes make mid-speech that cause listeners to "interrupt" (they think I finished my sentence and are asking for what they missed) is potentially a sign of a speech disfluency all my life...down a rabbit hole I go.

Same here. Over the last several years I’ve become increasingly frustrated with all the people who interrupt me mid-sentence, thinking them rude, only to realize I was creating natural openings for them. I’ve been working on making my sentences shorter and qualifying them later as needed.

I used to have a major stutter when my family moved states while I was in 5th grade. I was in New England with a Southern accent and teased because I also liked reading. I pretty much shut up after an especially embarrassing stutter on the word "collapse" during my turn to read aloud. Even the teacher laughed.

Punching my bully in the head months later gave me "cred" and my stutter lessened. In my brief stint in college, I decided to take a public speaking course because I had aspirations to be a rapper. What kind of musician performs with their back to their audience? (Sia, apparently)

All this to say, I've learned to live with my stutter. I have to pause and think about what I want to say sometimes but the way I manage it has been so fluid that I almost don't notice it. Most people I meet have no idea.

That said, I feel for everyone who has yet ANOTHER thing to think about on top of just being a decent human being traversing through life with other human beings.

There's no video filter to remove stuttering yet? Get busy, ML people. There's a market waiting.

While I understand the sentiment this type of filter would make people's lives with a disability worse in the real. Better to accept ones self then cover defining features with a filter

You know what: no. The only person who gets to decide what's best for helping a person cope with their differing needs is that person with differing needs.

But what if it solves the problem of barcoder not understanding stuttering? I mostly agree with you, but in principle subtitles and voice over does the same thing - not everything is so simple.

People being left to make their own decisions about using or foregoing prosthetic technologies sounds rather simple to me.

It's a can of worms. The trouble starts when the problem is solvable and/or doesn't pass to the next generation, and yet some parents insist their children not to be treated, or even to be inflicted with the problem, in order to keep them within the community of other people dealing with that problem.

I am thinking of the children; especially so - of their right to choose.

As a filter that can be enabled in a video player UI, it would act very much like subtitles or voice over - here it is an aid to the consumer and everybody makes their own decision. As a mandated thing for all stuttering content it's limiting freedom of expression and is bad. My point is that it is not black or white, and it depends how something is deployed.

Then we can accept there's not an ML solution for it, since sufferers haven't built it yet.

objectively this is false.

If that was the case, we wouldn't need psychologists, would we ?

I have to agree with barcoder here. To top it off the use cases for a filter aren't that great due to the temporal nature of stuttering.

For a look into the intersection of technology and disabilities I found this interview with a live streamer with tourettes pretty incredible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tlWjsaF1Og

Many deaf folks reject the use of hearing aids because they view their deafness as a positive, or their culture as important (their signing and shared experiences).

While it should always be up to the individual to decide what they want to do to their body, it’s never as straightforward as “we can do this, so we should”. My first thought (as someone who does not stutter, so my opinion is worth very little here) is that we send a poor message to those with stutters if we use technology to pretend stuttering doesn’t exist.

Again, just food for thought. I’d be more curious to hear what someone with a stutter thinks.

A better first step would be if Siri/Alexa/Google could wait if you thought you were stuttering. They don’t

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