That's hard to understand, because it seems like that would tremendously compound their limitations. You can't read signs at stores telling you what things are, 99% of the internet is unusable, computers are mostly unusable in general, you can't read for pleasure or read textbooks to learn so your education is going to be very limited, you can't watch TV shows or movies unless they have special ASL versions, the vast majority of jobs would be simply beyond you- office jobs are out entirely and even a lot of manual labor stuff is extra dangerous if you can't read warnings or instructions, and that's just off the top of my head. It just seems like it would be hard to ever live independently while being illiterate and deaf, but it's not very hard at all to imagine living independently while only being deaf. It makes sense that it would be harder to learn, particularly at first, but the cost of being illiterate is probably higher than the cost of being deaf, especially these days that more stuff can be done through text via the internet, so surely it would be worth nearly any effort to avoid having not one but two significant disabilities.
Some do learn to read (I've heard numbers from 5-15%) but they read like speed readers going straight from a string of graphemes directly to meaning without translating to phonemes. You may be underestimating the difficulty. It would be like trying to learn to speed read Arabic without ever having heard it spoken. And it's not like they generally don't try; most profoundly deaf people can read "2 apple for $1" or "Caution" or "Restroom" but that's not literacy.
That's hard to understand, because it seems like that would tremendously compound their limitations. You can't read signs at stores telling you what things are, 99% of the internet is unusable, computers are mostly unusable in general, you can't read for pleasure or read textbooks to learn so your education is going to be very limited, you can't watch TV shows or movies unless they have special ASL versions, the vast majority of jobs would be simply beyond you- office jobs are out entirely and even a lot of manual labor stuff is extra dangerous if you can't read warnings or instructions, and that's just off the top of my head. It just seems like it would be hard to ever live independently while being illiterate and deaf, but it's not very hard at all to imagine living independently while only being deaf. It makes sense that it would be harder to learn, particularly at first, but the cost of being illiterate is probably higher than the cost of being deaf, especially these days that more stuff can be done through text via the internet, so surely it would be worth nearly any effort to avoid having not one but two significant disabilities.
Some do learn to read (I've heard numbers from 5-15%) but they read like speed readers going straight from a string of graphemes directly to meaning without translating to phonemes. You may be underestimating the difficulty. It would be like trying to learn to speed read Arabic without ever having heard it spoken. And it's not like they generally don't try; most profoundly deaf people can read "2 apple for $1" or "Caution" or "Restroom" but that's not literacy.