This study was aimed at determining the reading mechanisms used by deaf adults who had completed secondary or higher education. Our main hypothesis was that they used a reading strategy consisting of identifying (some of) the key words of sentences and deriving an overall representation of their meaning. All the predictions derived from this hypothesis were supported by the results. In addition, an orthographic test showed that they possessed an orthographic lexicon richer than hearing group of the same reading level. This is in harmony with the "key word strategy." Finally, most of the deaf participants (12 out of 14) reached scores in metaphonological tasks slightly under the level reached by the hearing group. It is speculated that the mechanisms of reading and spelling at play in deaf adults are based on phonological representations of words.