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 “hurricane”
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.
When it comes to emergency preparedness as it happened during the hurricane Sandy that hit NYC area in October, it is important that deaf and hard of hearing people are informed via visual means such as captioning and sign language interpreting. So I applaud Bloomberg for using a professional sign language interpreter during his emergency announcements on TV along with captioning.
