There was a video by Fox 13 News Tampa Bay via Facebook yesterday that featured a man in a bright yellow shirt what turned out to be not a professional interpreter but someone who knew some ASL. This caused a big furor in the Deaf community.
Posts tagged as “Emergency”
Earlier this year a blizzard hit the east coast of USA and emergency announcements were posted not only on TV, but also online. Most of TV announcements were captioned and also sign language interpreters were included. However, most of online videos with announcements were NOT captioned. The majority of deaf and hard of hearing people does not know or understand sign language and relies on captioning.
This past weekend the blizzard hit the east coast of USA, so there were emergency announcements by mayors of cities and governors of states impacted by the blizzard. They are usually captioned on TV for millions of deaf and hard of hearing people. Lately, sign language interpreters have been included in emergency announcements. It may seem like an improvement in terms of communication access, but not this past weekend. It looked like sign language substituted captioning on several occasions.