Silence is a Feature, Not a Bug: A Deaf Developer’s Autoethnography on Agency and Local AI
Chenyang Gong · 2026 · Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26)
This CHI 2026 Extended Abstract is a three-page autoethnographic provocation by a Deaf computer science graduate student who uses a MED-EL cochlear implant. The author refuses the medical-model framing of deafness as deficit and instead argues that the ability to remove the…
autoethnography · deaf and hard of hearing · cochlear implant · automatic speech recognition · captioning