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		<!-- END ODIOGO LISTEN BUTTON v2.5.7 (WP) -->{"id":561,"date":"2009-09-25T11:01:58","date_gmt":"2009-09-25T11:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slewth.wordpress.com\/?p=561"},"modified":"2009-09-25T11:01:58","modified_gmt":"2009-09-25T11:01:58","slug":"british-sign-language-and-accessibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/09\/25\/british-sign-language-and-accessibility\/","title":{"rendered":"British Sign Language and Accessibility"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\t\t<!-- BEGIN ODIOGO LISTEN BUTTON v2.5.7 (WP) -->\r\n\t\t<script type=\"text\/javascript\" language=\"javascript\">\r\n\t\t<!--\r\n\t\t\/\/ ODIOGO_START:do_NOT_remove_this_comment\r\n\t\tshowOdiogoReadNowButton (\"687068\", \"British Sign Language and Accessibility\", \"561\", 290, 55);\r\n\t\t\/\/ -->\r\n\t\t<\/script>\r\n\t\t<br\/>\r\n\t\t<script type=\"text\/javascript\" language=\"javascript\">\r\n\t\t<!--\r\n\t\tshowInitialOdiogoReadNowFrame (\"687068\", \"561\", 290, 0);\r\n\t\t\/\/ ODIOGO_END:do_NOT_remove_this_comment\r\n\t\t\/\/ -->\r\n\t\t<\/script>\r\n\t\t<!-- END ODIOGO LISTEN BUTTON v2.5.7 (WP) -->\r\n\t\t\n<p>Over the past couple of weeks I\u2019ve 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\u2019re looking for links to video resources). As a result I\u2019ve been thinking about the BSL resources found online more generally. On Tuesday I was at AbilityNet\u2019s \u2018Accessibility 2.0: a million flower\u2019s bloom\u2019 conference. An early tip was Australian presenter Lisa Herrod (@<a title=\"Lisa Herrod's website\" href=\"http:\/\/scenariogirl.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">ScenarioGirl<\/a>), a consultant from <a href=\"http:\/\/scenarioseven.com.au\/\">Scenario Seven<\/a>, and expert in User Experience for Deaf users. Her talk \u2018Understanding Deafness: History, Language and the Web\u2019 blew this subject wide open.<\/p>\n<p>Lisa\u2019s <a title=\"Lisa Herrod Access2 presentation\" href=\"http:\/\/www.abilitynet.org.uk\/accessibility2\/pod\/\" target=\"_blank\">presentation and slides<\/a> are now available via AbilityNet. A transcript will become available soon.<\/p>\n<p>Lisa\u2019s presentation was a timely reminder of the ways in which Deaf people are often overlooked in internet practice and research:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>people tend to group deaf, Deaf and Hearing Impaired users into one big group of people who \u201cjust can\u2019t hear<\/strong>. Most of us know someone that has diminished hearing through age or industrial damage, noise etc. But <strong>few of us understand Deafness from a cultural, linguistic perspective<\/strong>, 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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\u00a0had a huge and positive\u00a0\u00a0impact on\u00a0distance communications for the Deaf community. In this sense <strong>Web 2.0 provides powerful tools for Deaf people to come together<\/strong>. However, Lisa also showed how internet resources\u00a0can\u00a0cause problems for\u00a0Sign Language users\u00a0due to an over-reliance on large amounts of complicated text; text that assumes a\u00a0fluent native speaker.\u00a0 In short, Web 2.0 is effective for Signed collaboration, but the textual basis of content is still a problem.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0In discussion,\u00a0Lisa identified a vital distinction between <strong>captioning<\/strong> and <strong>subtitling. <\/strong>Captioning reports speech directly into text, whereas Subtitling is more interpretive and intended for quick and easy understanding.\u00a0 Where a\u00a0person with dyslexia might watch and listen to a\u00a0video 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.<\/p>\n<p>Another powerful message from Lisa&#8217;s presentation relates to the global status of BSL more specifically.\u00a0\u00a0Early in her talk Lisa refuted a common popular misconception that Deaf people across the world have the same signed language.\u00a0 Spoken English and American English are nearly identical, but\u00a0British 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\u00a0stemming from\u00a0the 1800s. As with the development of any language, Sign Languages have grown out of small communities and expanded simultaneously from disparate beginnings.\u00a0This history\u00a0forcefully underlines the difference between\u00a0ASL and BSL, but what does it mean for the web?<\/p>\n<p>BSL speakers are a linguistic minority online. American English is\u00a0a dominant internet language, and in my experience, American Sign Language also dominate searches and\u00a0resources. 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.\u00a0 Other accessibility concerns may be solved or mediated\u00a0with international expertise. But the national and linguistic independence of British Deaf culture means\u00a0that accessible video\/text and BSL materials\u00a0must be prioritised in the UK.<\/p>\n<p>Time for me to sign up\u00a0for BSL Level 2.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\r\n\t\t<!-- BEGIN ODIOGO LISTEN BUTTON v2.5.7 (WP) -->\r\n\t\t<script type=\"text\/javascript\" language=\"javascript\">\r\n\t\t<!--\r\n\t\t\/\/ ODIOGO_START:do_NOT_remove_this_comment\r\n\t\tshowOdiogoReadNowButton (\"687068\", \"British Sign Language and Accessibility\", \"561\", 290, 55);\r\n\t\t\/\/ -->\r\n\t\t<\/script>\r\n\t\t<br\/>\r\n\t\t<script type=\"text\/javascript\" language=\"javascript\">\r\n\t\t<!--\r\n\t\tshowInitialOdiogoReadNowFrame (\"687068\", \"561\", 290, 0);\r\n\t\t\/\/ ODIOGO_END:do_NOT_remove_this_comment\r\n\t\t\/\/ -->\r\n\t\t<\/script>\r\n\t\t<!-- END ODIOGO LISTEN BUTTON v2.5.7 (WP) -->\r\n\t\t\n<p>Over the past couple of weeks I\u2019ve 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\u2019re looking for links to video resources). As a result I\u2019ve been thinking about the BSL resources [&hellip;]<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7,12,32,33],"tags":[282,38,283,62,114],"class_list":["post-561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accessibility","category-bsl","category-e-learning","category-web-20","category-webtech","tag-accessibility","tag-accessibility2","tag-bsl","tag-digitalinclusion","tag-lisa-herrod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slewth.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}