This paper discusses some possible implications for deaf persons of several areas of computer‐related research and development. For the most part, this research and development has not been motivated by an interest in facilitating communication by and with deaf people. We argue that some of the results of these activities do have the potential for facilitating such communication, but that the potential will probably not be realized without explicit efforts to apply those results to the needs of deaf persons. The research and development areas that are discussed are: speech compression and speech synthesis, speech understanding systems, and computer‐mediated message technology.