What does being hearing impaired have to do with writing?

Answer 1

When you're learning to read and write, you do so by first learning the phonetic sounds of the letters. Then you're taught to "sound it out;" basically speak or "hear" the word in your head and figure out the corresponding letters to spell the word. For the hearing impaired, this is obviously much more difficult. Aside from not being able to match the a sound of a letter in the alphabet, they do not have the connections between a spoken word and its meaning (someone says "dog;" you get an image of a pooch in your mind) that the hearing-capable have.

Often, other approaches to reading and writing are needed, for instance those which focus on visual memory (matching words to pictures) and pattern recognition—learning to recognize the shapes of whole words and so on.