This week (5-11th May) is Deaf Awareness Week, an opportunity to celebrate d/Deaf* people, communities, and culture, and to advocate for equal access to communication and services for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing. A recent step forward is that sign language has started appearing on railway stations.
*”deaf” with a lower-case “d” refers to
audiological experience of deafness,
or those who might have become deafened
or hard of hearing in later life, so might identify
closer to the hearing community.
“Deaf” with an upper-case “D” refers
to the cultural experience of deafness, or those
who might have been born Deaf and
therefore identify with the Deaf community.
This is similar to how people might describe themselves
as “having a disability” versus “being disabled”.
If you’re like me and travel by train a lot (long time CS4FN readers will be aware of my love of railway timetabling), you may have seen these relatively new British Sign Language (BSL) screens at various railway stations.
They work by automatically converting train departure information into BSL by stitching together pre-recorded videos of BSL signs. Pretty cool stuff!
When I first saw these, though, there was one small thing that piqued my interest – if d/Deaf people can see the screen, why not just read the text? I was sure it wasn’t an oversight: Network Rail and train operators worked closely with d/Deaf charities and communities when designing the system: so being a researcher in training, I decided to look into it.
It turns out that the answer has various lines of reasoning.
There’s been many years of research investigating reading comprehension for d/Deaf people compared to their hearing peers. A cohort of d/Deaf children, in a 2015 paper, had significantly weaker reading comprehension skills than both hearing children of the same chronological and reading age.
Although this gap does seem to close with age, some d/Deaf people may be far more comfortable and skilful using BSL to communicate and receive information. It should be emphasised that BSL is considered a separate language and is structured very differently to spoken and written English. As an example, take the statement:
“I’m on holiday next month.”
In BSL, you put the time first, followed by topic and then comment, so you’d end up with:
“next month – holiday – me”
As one could imagine, trying to read English (a second language for many d/Deaf people) with its wildly different sentence structure could be a challenge… especially as you’re rushing through the station looking for the correct platform for your train!
Sometimes, as computer scientists, we’re encouraged to remove redundancies and make our systems simpler and easy-to-use. But something that appears redundant to one person could be extremely useful to another – so as we go on to create tools and applications, we need to make sure that all target users are involved in the design process.
– Daniel Gill, Queen Mary University of London
More on…
- Johanna Lucht and Robert Weitbrecht: pioneering deaf computer scientists
- Disability stars in Computer Science
- British Deaf Association [EXTERNAL]
- National Deaf Children’s Society [EXTERNAL]
- Deafax on Deaf/deaf distinction [EXTERNAL]
Magazines …
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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
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