Sign Language: News
Legal suit for "Speech Disorder", November 2009
Kimie Oya, a Deaf woman aged 60s from Nagoya City, Japan, sued a hearing man for the injury from a car accident in 2005. The injury involves her left wrist and finger that affected her inability to manually speak as efficiently as before. On November 25th, 2009, the Nagoya district court judge ordered the man to compensate her about 12.2 million yen for the "communication damage" (disability of communication). The lawyer representing Oya, "the decision that admits the residual disablity of the signing function of the Deaf person as equal to the able-bodied person's speech disorder would be the first in the country." -- Deaf Japan News, http://deafjapan.blogspot.com/ (November 25, 2009).