When Jessalyn Akerman- Frank reached the checkout counter of a grocery store near her home in St. Paul, Minnesota, the cashier started chatting. Akerman-Frank pointed to her ears to indicate that she was deaf.

The cashier immediately switched modes, gesturing “Paper or plastic,” pointing to the dollar amount on the screen. Akerman-Frank was impressed, so she continued frequenting the store. After a while, the cashier started saying “Have a nice day” and “How are you?” to her in American Sign Language.

“It was such an amazing experience that now I don’t shop anywhere else,” Akerman-Frank said. She recommends the store to deaf friends and uses it as an example of how to connect with people in the deaf community.

The point she wants to make is: You don’t have to know sign language to communicate with someone who is deaf.

“Think outside the box: gesture, text, play charades,” Akerman-Frank said. “We will not be offended. There are a lot more of you than there are of us.”

Akerman-Frank is acutely aware of that imbalance — about 20% of Minnesotans are deaf or deafblind, according to the state’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services Division. Every day she encounters barriers that hearing people hardly notice, such as an event announced on the radio that Akerman- Frank would have no way of knowing about.

“People who can hear can go to any movie they want, any theater, any therapist, any baseball game,” she said in an interview conducted through a sign-language interpreter. “They can do whatever they want, anytime they want, and know they’ll be able to understand what’s going on. We don’t have that.”

Akerman-Frank, 48, has spent her career organizing programs that give deaf people access to the same sorts of activities and resources that hearing people have. She co-founded Deaf Equity, a Minnesota-based nonprofit serving the deaf community. She has worked on behalf of deaf survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. And she teaches yoga for deaf people, one of fewer than 25 deaf yoga teachers in the U.S., she said.

“If she experiences something in the hearing world, she asks ‘How can we adopt this so my people can experience what everybody else experiences?’ ” said her wife, Lys Akerman- Frank. These could be as simple as asking for closed captions on the TV in a bar, so deaf people can “watch the same game as a hearing person listening to the game and having a beer,” said Lys, who is not deaf.

Tarra Grammenos, a sign-language interpreter, has known Akerman-Frank since she started training as an interpreter after high school and considers her a mentor.

“She showed me what it meant to be a leader, and what it meant to give back to the community you care so much about,” Grammenos said. “She is a force to be reckoned with.”

Akerman-Frank grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the oldest of six children and the only deaf member of the family. They communicated through their own made-up system of signs, although years later when she was away at college, her entire family learned sign language to surprise her when she came home on break.

In grade school and high school, she was often in special classes for deaf students, where she learned to communicate with sign language as well as written English, and underwent speech therapy. Afterward, she spent a year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before transferring to Gallaudet University in Washington, a private college for deaf students.

She didn’t know what to expect at Gallaudet. It changed her life.

“It was a freeing experience,” she said. “I was definitely culture-shocked.”

The janitors at Gallaudet knew sign language. The cafeteria employees knew sign language. The merchants at shops surrounding the campus knew sign language. Akerman-Frank met deaf doctors, deaf lawyers and other highly educated and successful deaf people.

“Growing up, I was mostly around people who could hear, so I didn’t really have a lot of ideas about what I could become until I got to Gallaudet,” she said. “That’s a space where I developed myself. I could become somebody. I knew I had a future when I was there.”

She took every class she could fit into her schedule. “I felt like I was truly catching up on my life,” she said.

These days, Akerman- Frank works not only to make experiences for hearing people accessible to deaf people but also creates new “deaf spaces” specifically tailored for that community.

“For example, I will go to a theater and I see the actors through an interpreter, but I’m not necessarily getting direct access or feeling directly involved,” she said. “As opposed to a deaf show, a deaf play where I have access to those actors — not through a third person, but through direct communication.”

Akerman-Frank is a candidate for a cochlear implant, a small, surgically implanted electronic device that does not lead to full hearing but can provide some sound to a deaf person and, with training, help them understand speech.

But she does not want a cochlear implant.

“I’m a very proud deaf woman,” she said. “I was meant to be a deaf person. I’m perfect the way I am. I was not meant to hear. So for me, it was never an option.”

She makes clear, however, that everyone gets to make their own decisions about cochlear implants and she does not judge those who make different decisions, “just as I hope they do not judge me for deciding that it is not right for me,” she said.

Being deaf is an integral part of Akerman-Frank’s identity. It comes up so often in her interaction with the world, such as needing an interpreter for interacting with hearing people. She often talks with her interpreters to learn more about the hearing world.

“Hearing people see us as different, and we’re not that different when it boils down to it, right?” she said. “We have the same struggles in life, the same joys, the same grief. They use an auditory language, and we use American Sign Language, and we’re proud of that.”