my heart goes out to Tara McAvoy's family...
I just read about it in the news. (For details see - Http://www.news8austin.com/content/your_news/default.asp?ArID=157344 )
While I'm only hard of hearing, I still pay a fair amount of attention to what goes on in the deaf community, and this has sent something of a shock wave through it it seems. Unfortunately, hearing and non-hearing people are already using this to beat their drums about how she should have stayed completely clear of the tracks.
Their all missing an important point, and that was this young lady would be alive today if the railroad co's had some better indicators that a train was coming besides somebody simply tooting his loud horn. I've seen the railroads going around installing more modern warning systems for cities and ripping out the flashing light systems for various reasons, leaving us Deaf & Hard of Hearing (HoH) people to fend for ourselves. Companies are always saying that their trying to improve the safety of their products, but this is one area sadly lacking. Couldn't they create a simple text alert system for deaf & HoH people? I mean, our society can create a widely available emergency warning system that alerts people by radio, teletext and cell phone networks, but *not* something like this? Come on! I realize that as citizens in any culture we tend to fall between the cracks a lot, but does not have to be.
A simple radio transmitter sending out a warning signal could have triggered some text or flasher device to warn her of the danger - devices like this could also be used to compliment the beeping noise of vehicles backing up. It would be such a simple matter for every deaf or HoH person to have such a device with them like a cell phone. The reasons why such devices are not available are not "good enough" in my mind. "There's not enough profit", isn't a good one (Products for Deaf/HOH are always expensive), "the government shouldn't pay for it", isn't a good one (We pay for them already - Did I mention that products for Deaf/HOH are always expensive?), neither is "the mainstream isn't interested", isn't either (because We buy them not the mainstream)!
Just had to get that little tidbit off my chest. :)