WILTON – Gail Carlson was born deaf but her French-speaking parents didn’t know it until she was in kindergarten.

Doctors originally told her mother her 3-year-old daughter was mentally retarded but the mother of seven children knew better, Carlson said.

Carlson, of Wilton, signed her words with her hands and facial expressions as she spoke during a meeting of an advisory committee overseeing Hands On Pah!, a service of the Wilton Free Public Library dedicated to meeting informational and accessibility needs of the deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Western and Central Maine.

She is 95 percent deaf in her right ear and 75 percent deaf in her left ear.

Her siblings taught her to talk using a mirror. Her first word was cup, she said, and though no sound came out at first, she put her hand on her larynx and learned to make her voice stronger.

After 13 years of speech therapy and introduction to American Sign Language and the deaf culture by her first husband, also a deaf person, she now speaks clearly, reads lips and hears some with a hearing aid in her left ear.

If a voice is at the right level and she can see the person speak, she doesn’t need an interpreter.

Carlson is an American Sign Language instructor at Central Maine Community College and was hired full-time to teach sign language at Lisbon High School starting this fall.

“I always wanted to be a teacher,” she said. “I went to art school but I didn’t become a teacher because of my deafness. How ironic it is; I’m a teacher because of my deafness.”

She uses her daily life experiences to help educate her students.

Carlson a member of the Hands On Pah! Advisory Committee will offer American Sign Language classes at the library as part of the service.

Pah! is an expression in American Sign Language that loosely translated means “Finally, we made it!”

The advisory committee consists of deaf and hearing volunteers responsible for communications with the deaf community, fundraising, event planning, and development of library services and collections.

Library Assistant Director Lynne Hunter, a member of the advisory committee who is studying the language, said it is important to make sure the library is accessible to the deaf community and provides resources to help people learn to communicate with the deaf.

Libraries are no longer just a place that have books, Hunter said, they’re really becoming community resource connectors.

There are a lot of people interested in learning to communicate with the deaf and learning about deaf culture, she said.

Committee members plan to do a statewide survey of the deaf community to see what services they would like to see at a library, Sherry Walrathe, a retired interpreter from Strong, said.

“If we can instill and build a love of books and reading and help deaf children become readers, it would be be an amazing step forward,” Walrathe said.

If children could come to a library and get help choosing books and be able to have someone available to interpret them for them, it would be wonderful, she said.

“What’s important to me to get across is this is a service we’re developing,” Hunter said. “Deafness is an identity; it’s not a handicap.”

Hunter said they’ve had wonderful success with the program so far.

“We’ve been adding to our collection of books that expose readers to the deaf culture,” Hunger said.

Carlson, now married to a hearing man and with a hearing son, said when she was younger she thought she was the only one in the world who was deaf. Now she knows differently.

“I have the best of both worlds,” she said. “I’m smiling I have so many different skills. I feel very happy I’m looking for deaf people. I’m slowly reaching out. I would like to be a role model for deaf children.”