A message from the founder, Mike Burton

Mike Burton, Founder

A teenager’s hands flew in the air as he walked under a cedar tree on the GSD campus. I asked the Superintendent, "What was he saying?" He responded, "Oh nothing, he walked through a spider web." My first day on the job and I didn’t know the difference between brushing off a spider web and sign language. I vowed to learn this poetry in motion. As the only art teacher in 1970, I would teach almost 700 students every week in an old civil war era building across the street from the main campus. Talk about total immersion! Students ranged in age from 5 to 21 with a high percentage who had deaf family. Maybe my interest in sculpture and drama helped me pick up the nuances of ASL for in a short time I was interpreting for teacher meetings and then college classes.

There were teachers who said, "These deaf students are too lazy or too dumb to learn." I found this to be utterly untrue. All day long students were tapping me on the arm asking, "What does this word mean? What does that word mean?" They were starved for information but with a limited means to access information except from their peers. I went home every afternoon with "tap craters" on both my arms.

One day a bright senior boy asked me, "What does I-M-P-R-O-V-E mean?" The sentence was: "The man improved his house". Some of my colleagues preached that, "The dictionary is the best friend of a deaf student." So, I handed him a dictionary and told him, "Look it up." He proceeded to find the word and then became very angry. He slammed the dictionary down and "got into my face." "What’s the problem?" I asked as he shoved the definition into my face. It read: To enhance the quality thereof. I made a second vow: to create an ASL/English dictionary for the deaf like a Spanish/English dictionary. Look up the word "caballo" and see the word "horse". Unfortunately, this required video and a method to access signs or snippets of video instantly. This was not available although I experimented with various kinds of VCRs and playback systems.

Our signers: Nicki McBee, Pam Bolton, Mark McCall, Milinda McCall, Julie Burton (left to right) and Misty Baldwin (below).

Forty years later the technology and the concept are finally coming together. I demonstrated my first prototype at the NATO conference on technology for the deaf in the Netherlands in 1992. The laser disc technology of that time was quite expensive and cumbersome, but as computer cost came down and the power went up and the video compression became more efficient it was possible to produce educational materials at a fraction of the laser disc cost.

Milinda and Nicki were talking about why they were willing to work so hard to make this project successful. They said, “We wish we had had something like this when we were going to school to make our learning easier. We don’t want the students today to struggle and be as frustrated as we were when we were in school.” They are changing the way deaf students learn and are opening up a world that has been closed off to many deaf people for far too long.Why don't you be a part of this project and give us feedback and support our programs?

Our Team

Many people helped with this project on both the technical side and on the ASL & pedagogy.

The people pictured above are currently contributing to the project as signers, narrators and ASL consultants.

Joseph Cooper is our technical guru in charge of programming, web page design, online marketing and technical support & writing.

John Johnston is working with all facets from videography to marketing with major interest in animation and relating Burton Vision to state standards.

Our other deaf signers and ASL narrators, most of whom attended residential schools for the deaf where they acquired their fluency in American Sign Language:

David Conti, Donna Keller, Sidney Sharp, Janet George, Don Stringfield, Jamie Saunders, Sonny Wasiloski , Sarah Irvin, Trina Parker, Francee Ardito, Debbie Zeigler, Frank Osborne, Angie Osborne, Tina Blaxton, Jennifer, Benje Estes, David Camp, Lynette McElwee.