Category: BSL

Call for Contributions: 6th Nottingham Research Network Conference


The Nottingham Research Network (Special Educational Needs, Social and Educational Inclusion, Health and Disabilities) has issued a second call for papers for their 6th annual conference, scheduled for Friday 13th January 2012.  This free conference is a collaborative and friendly event that welcomes presentations from people outside academia, as well as those who have not presented before. At previous conferences delegates have represented local schools, councils, student and housing groups, charities, advocacy organisations, support workers, and academics from a variety of disciplines across Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham (to name but a few). I have a lot of affection for this conference – the inaugural conference was my first experience of having my presentation interpreted by a BSL interpreter – and this early postgraduate presentation subsequently led to my becoming involved with Human Factors research in Engineering, alongside my own work in Learning Sciences and Disability Studies. It is this kind of juncture, between social sciences and hard sciences, as well as the applied and practical aspects of the conference that make it so important to Nottingham.

This years’ theme is “Creative Approaches to Building Relationships”. At present there is no online presence for the conference (the network has  previously been active on Ning) so I’m reproducing the call for papers in full here.

The Nottingham Research Network
(Special Educational Needs, Social and Educational Inclusion, Health and Disabilities)

6th Annual conference
“Connecting people with shared interests to promote increased collaboration”

Call for contributions on the theme of

CREATIVE APPROACHES TO BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

University of Nottingham
(Jubilee Campus)

Friday 13th January 2012 from 9.00-16.00

We welcome proposals for presentations, workshops and/or innovative approaches. We are keen to encourage new presenters. Please contact us by September 22nd:

  • Anne Emerson, Communication for Inclusion Research Unit, Division of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University.
  • Edward Sellman, School of Education, University of Nottingham.
  • Jackie Dearden, Children’s Services, MALT Central, Community Educational Psychology Service, Nottingham.

The conference is a local one, aimed at increasing communication between researchers, practitioners, learners and others in the field. However, the network is a successful one – entering the 6th year of this annual conference. If you are looking to establish a similar city wide, or sub-regional network, I recommend getting in touch with one of the contacts above for information.

Digital Election Special


Yesterday Alex Watson (@Sifter) published Use the Internet to Decide How to Vote on bit-tech. The article identifies various resources, from checking your voter status at 192.com to researching your current MP at They Work For You.

With less than 24 hours till polling, this post is a little late, but I’d like to highlight a couple of excellent resources the have emerging from digital accessibility communities via Twitter.

First up, consider the excellent work by Elena Newly (via Twitter @AutismWales) who has worked to provide Easy-Read summaries of all the political Parties’ manifestos. These Easy-Read documents are designed for learning disabled adults and those involved with the LD community. She has also created an Easy-Read Summary of the second TV Leaders’ Debate.

Secondly, consider the election resources available from the British Sign Language Broadcasting Trust . This has included a schedule of signed programmes and two key Election broadcasts available online:

The first election special deals with the voting process.

The second election special ‘Your Country Needs You’ focuses on making an informed decision.

If you know of other digital resources I’ve missed, please add a comment below.

British Sign Language and Accessibility


Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had a lot of hits from people looking for online learning materials to support a new term of CACDAP courses in British Sign Language (tap BSL into the search box if you’re looking for links to video resources). As a result I’ve been thinking about the BSL resources found online more generally. On Tuesday I was at AbilityNet’s ‘Accessibility 2.0: a million flower’s bloom’ conference. An early tip was Australian presenter Lisa Herrod (@ScenarioGirl), a consultant from Scenario Seven, and expert in User Experience for Deaf users. Her talk ‘Understanding Deafness: History, Language and the Web’ blew this subject wide open.

Lisa’s presentation and slides are now available via AbilityNet. A transcript will become available soon.

Lisa’s presentation was a timely reminder of the ways in which Deaf people are often overlooked in internet practice and research:

people tend to group deaf, Deaf and Hearing Impaired users into one big group of people who “just can’t hear. Most of us know someone that has diminished hearing through age or industrial damage, noise etc. But few of us understand Deafness from a cultural, linguistic perspective, i.e. from the perspective of those Deaf who use sign language as a first language and may not be fluent in English as a second language.

British Sign Language is the first language for approximately 50,000 Deaf people in the UK. This gestural language is wholly different to spoken and written English. Lisa highlighted how developments from texting through to video conferencing have had a huge and positive  impact on distance communications for the Deaf community. In this sense Web 2.0 provides powerful tools for Deaf people to come together. However, Lisa also showed how internet resources can cause problems for Sign Language users due to an over-reliance on large amounts of complicated text; text that assumes a fluent native speaker.  In short, Web 2.0 is effective for Signed collaboration, but the textual basis of content is still a problem.

So far, these observations have clear intersects with accessibility issues for foreign language speakers and people with print impairments such as dyslexia. However, a specific barrier unique to Deaf people online can come in the form of video captioning. In discussion, Lisa identified a vital distinction between captioning and subtitling. Captioning reports speech directly into text, whereas Subtitling is more interpretive and intended for quick and easy understanding.  Where a person with dyslexia might watch and listen to a video rather than read a text, with dubbed versions available to French or Chinese viewers, interpretive subtitling allows a Deaf person to understand and take in visual content.

Another powerful message from Lisa’s presentation relates to the global status of BSL more specifically.  Early in her talk Lisa refuted a common popular misconception that Deaf people across the world have the same signed language.  Spoken English and American English are nearly identical, but British Sign Language and American Sign Language (ASL) are very different. In fact, ASL has more in common with French Sign Language due to a shared linguistic ancestry stemming from the 1800s. As with the development of any language, Sign Languages have grown out of small communities and expanded simultaneously from disparate beginnings. This history forcefully underlines the difference between ASL and BSL, but what does it mean for the web?

BSL speakers are a linguistic minority online. American English is a dominant internet language, and in my experience, American Sign Language also dominate searches and resources. BSL is from the same family of languages as Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and New Zealand Sign Language, but the American orientation of internet culture made it difficult for me as a BSL beginner to find resources relevant to the UK beyond established portals and communities. In these terms, British Sign Language must be prioritised online at every level.  Other accessibility concerns may be solved or mediated with international expertise. But the national and linguistic independence of British Deaf culture means that accessible video/text and BSL materials must be prioritised in the UK.

Time for me to sign up for BSL Level 2.

Sign Language Compendium


Caramel Whistle have just published the results of a thorough trawl of the web, seeking out the best Sign Language resources for students of BSL.  This round-up includes Mobile Signs and some of the resources and technical vocab sites I’ve listed here previously, but more importantly he introduces some great new finds.

For me, there are two clear highlights. The first is Spread the Sign, a European website that hosts a text-to-sign search.  This allows you to translate a word or phrase from a range of european spoken languages into a sign language equivalent.  You can search for a term and then view the results in BSL, or see it signed in any of 10 languages, including Swedish, Turkish, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Czech.  Importantly,  video is smooth and sharp.  This is a great site that rewards exploration.

The second highlight is Qia Resources for ICT.  This site offers common and specialist vocabulary on Information and Communications Technology. As with Art Signs, this is useful for anyone working in media, education, computer science or a related discipline.

See the full article here: Learning-a-Language.

Mobile BSL Dictionary


mobile phone icon
MobileSign Icon

Since starting my BSL course last year (final exam on Monday!) I’ve been struck by the potential for mobile technologies to assist translation and memory for BSL students on the move. As a result, I was really excited to discover Mobilesign, an online dictionary developed by the University of Bristol’s Centre for Deaf Studies (and discovered via a hunch based upon yesterday’s edition of the BBC’s See Hear).  From what I can glean, Mobilesign has been developed in conjunction with SignStation, a website promoting Deaf awareness and workplace materials.

Mobilesign contains over 5000 BSL signs, available through a minimal, mobile friendly interface. Suitable for phones, PDAs and any other networked mobile tech, signs can be searched for by string (any search term, or set of terms) or through the A-Z index.  Through sister site SignStation you can explore by category or via a picture dictionary when you register. Registration is free.

Bristol cite an underlying bespoke content management system allowing
access to indexes of the most requested signs, related signs and regional variations.  This rewards exploration, and complements other materials from CACDAP and the great resources developed by the University of Wolverhampton that I’ve linked to previously.  To see all my articles linking to BSL resources, pop ‘BSL’ in the search box, or use the BSL category listed on the left.

BSL Video Resources Online 2


Last week I blogged about Art Signs – an excellent video resource produced by Wolverhampton University, specialising in BSL vocabulary relevant to those in the arts, (higher) education or (in my case) digital media.  Yesterday I spoke to some colleagues looking for wider vocabulary, so here are some links to other extensive glossary sites developed by Wolverhampton for those building skills in BSL in Further and Higher Education…

  • Science Signs
    Including glossaries for anatomy, biology, chemistry, genetics, physics, environmental science, geography and geology.  If you want to know what the sign for deoxyribonucleic acid is, you’ve come to the right place.
  • Engineering Signs
    Including glossaries for architecture, construction, housing, surveying, computer aided design, civil engineering, electronic and electrical engineering and mechanical engineering.
  • Secondary Curriculum Signs
    If the above university websites are over whelming, a reduced dictionary is available via the Scottish Sensory Centre. They also deliver the ‘crowded cottage‘ which features some household and day-to-day signs alongside some fun colloquialisms.

BSL Video Resources Online


I’ve been taking a CACDP British Sign Language (BSL) Level 1 course this year to develop my communication skills. My final exam is in a few weeks, with a topic focused specifically on work.  Early in the course our course tutor John Smith, put the group in the way of newly developed BSL Online Learning Support resources for students studying our CACDP Level 1 course and as our vocabulary has developed, the value of such online video resources have become more and more appreciated.

The CACDP site is great for very basic vocabulary, but due to my academic background I’ve been searching for other online resources to use in tandem with the course to help revise specific vocabulary around higher education and learning sciences.  During this search I’ve discovered the excellent Art Signs.

Art Signs is a glossary site from the University of Wolverhampton featuring  hundreds of signs for the Arts categorised by discipline, alongside those relating to research, learning and teaching.  Signs are listed alphabetically and thematically. Clips are short and speedy – but this is a comprehensive database.  Everything from file types and internet terms, through methodology, to teaching and learning vocabulary is on there. Art Signs rewards careful searching and will be of great benefit to those working in Education, Research, Media, Technology and the Arts.

BSL Online Learning Support launched


At the start of the month I signed on to a CACDP course for a level one certificate in British Sign Language (BSL) at South Nottingham College. As anyone learning a sign language will know, paper notes can be difficult to revise from, so I anticipated hitting video materials online safe in the knowledge that we are all living in the future, I would find everything necessary to my personal advancement with the aid of the mighty YouTube. A bit naive?! Frankly, yes.

Although we may be living in the future (robot companions notwithstanding, DISCUSS), it quickly became clear that YouTube is not the place to rehearse your BSL. American Sign Language is, perhaps unsurprisingly, king, and even then using the search tool to hunt through the video archive for relevant vocabulary is increasingly like dowsing with a meat hammer. I was therefore delighted today to discover that CACDP has very recently launched an Online Learner Support Pack for BSL 101.

The Online Learner Support Pack is a free resource for everyone starting to do BSL101, and is a great way to help learners get off to a good start in learning British Sign Language.The Support Pack allows access to hundreds of videos of individual signs and sentences to help practising between classes, so if you have trouble remembering a sign, you can now go online to find and practise it instantly. Topics from BSL101 covered include the manual alphabet, numbers, transport, meeting people, weather, and directions.  As the internet becomes more mobile, I wonder if this can and will become the BSL pocket dictionary?

CACDP stress that this resource cannot be used to learn the complex language of BSL alone, as it is intended to only to compliment the methods of BSL teachers.  However, for those learning, or wishing to ‘Brush Up’ their British Sign Language skills, the online support materials are currently available to all, gratis.  To register visit: http://bslsupport.cacdp.org.uk/.