He found his voice at twelve.

Charles Coleman Jr., formerly Isaac Coleman, was born Deaf in Ghana. For the first twelve years of his life, he had no access to language at all.

His father was overseas for work and his mother lived in the U.S. — with no one able to sign, there was no way in or out. Thoughts, emotions, frustrations: all of it stayed unspoken. At twelve, his father came home, discovered his son couldn't read or write, and hired a tutor who taught him literacy through sign language. That was the day language arrived.

He attended a Deaf school in Ghana, then moved to the United States after graduation to join his mother. A talent for visual art became a way of thinking — one he eventually channeled into technology, enrolling at NTID and earning an Associate's degree in Applied Computing. The throughline was personal: a career built on making sure no one else has to wait twelve years for a door to open.

He built that career from the ground up at RIT/NTID — lab assistant, tutor, technical support specialist, and now Instructional Technology Coordinator II — taking on more ownership each year of the systems that make Deaf and hard-of-hearing education actually work. He helped launch NTID's first Inclusive Course Design certificate program, now part of RIT's Diversity Education offerings, and in 2026 delivered the commencement address to the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, in English and ASL.