Special page for deaf people?
ok, so first off – look at this web page.
It’s a web page for ‘Deaf and Hard of hearing people’ and it has videos of a lady doing sign language of the text…
Am I missing something? Deaf people can read – so what’s with need for the special page? Or is it just a triumph of a salesman and the ultimate in accessibility?
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What if they couldn’t read, though *shrug*
Actually, American Sign Language != English. There are many deaf people who do not read English or do not read it well at all. The video is not “the sign language of the text” in the sense that there is a sign for each English word in the text. It is a translation of the text into American Sign Language. If I were to give you a “word for word” rendition of the ASL video, it would be as confusing to you as the English would be for many deaf people.
thanks chris-I had no idea!
John
It looks to me like they went overboard on the accessibiity without thinking about it. If they were going to use ASL as a translation, you would also think they would have translated their site to other languages.
I think they took the Accessibility Guideline to provide transcription a bit overboard. Especially since to really make it accessible, they should provide transcription of the ASL videos. If they had videos (which a cursory look at the site doesn’t show), all they would have had to do would be to provide either captioning or transcripts.
The site is very much interested in showing how accessible they are, if you scroll down to the bottom of the screen, you will see the little buttons a lot of people used to use that automatically said whether you were accessible or not.
Basically what Christopher said. Except I doubt it’s in ASL; being an English site, it’s almost certainly in British Sign Language. Basically anyone who has BSL as a first language won’t understand much English vocabulary, as it’s simply not in their lexicon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Sign_Language