What good does it do a deaf person who can't read to arrive at pages that are not sign-translated?
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the reason that this feels like a combination of government-waste and possibly virtue-signaling is that only the column headings seem to be sign-translated. Even if it lets some people know that they click on the tourism or jobs or culture section of the website, the content within those pages doesn't seem to be sign-translated. So how does it really help anybody? Hell, can you even get to this website in the first place if you can't read?
And I don't know how Columbia's Internet works, but if you can read and aren't wealthy enough to afford fast Internet, maybe loading up videos while trying to browse the site makes the site slower and a worse experience for everybody.
Perhaps the sentiment behind this is noble, and as an experiment it sure is interesting, but I'm not convinced that it really helps as is yet. Maybe this is a foundation for something more interesting down the road, but we'll see.
PS: As a side note, while I can't read the content, the site itself looks pretty visually interesting and well-done.
No reason to get upset over language conventions. There are many countries in which Colombia is refered to as Columbia (mostly phonetically). Same for the US: most countries refer to it simply as America. There are at least two countries which can be refered to as Congo. Beijing is refered to as Peking in old literature and in many european countries as well.
But if there was a famous guy called Congu who was so famous people had named territories elsewhere after him and he had his own clothing label to boot -- ensuring that his name was foremost in the popular psyche -- then it wouldn't change the fact that if one called 'Congo' 'Congu', one would have made a simple spelling error.
If I was a resident of Congo, I would appreciate it when people corrected this error. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> but the reason that this feels like a combination of government-waste and possibly virtue-signaling
I’ve felt this same way about all these government press conferences that have a picture-in-picture of someone doing sign language translation. I genuinely don’t understand the point apart from virtue signaling. Why not just use live transcription? I can’t imagine that we don’t have the tech to do a good job of it now, in real time, or close enough.
> I’ve felt this same way about all these government press conferences that have a picture-in-picture of someone doing sign language translation. I genuinely don’t understand the point apart from virtue signaling. Why not just use live transcription?
I understand why you might feel this way, so let me try to explain.
Sign languages are a completely different modality/type of language than written and spoken languages. For example, American Sign Language (ASL) is completely unrelated to written and spoken English, and conveying a message between languages is often complicated and requires someone to actively interpret -- it's more of an art than a science. So while Closed Captioning was a huge step forward for making things accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people, it's still a subpar method of communication because for deaf people, especially deaf immigrants, written English is often their 2nd/3rd/4th language. When you are communicating important information where comprehension is essential, you *need* an interpreter.
This is absolutely correct. ASL is so deeply different from English that in certain circumstances where it's a priority that a signer's understanding of the topic is clear there can be two interpreters at once. A hearing interpreter who interprets verbatim to a Deaf interpreter (a CDI, or certified Deaf interpreter) who then interprets to the Deaf recipient.
Public broadcasts should absolutely be interpreted to ensure that everyone has access to understanding them.
I encourage everyone to learn more about ASL and to learn a bit of ASL themselves. There are many amazing resources put out by Deaf people to help folks learn.
> A hearing interpreter who interprets verbatim to a Deaf interpreter (a CDI, or certified Deaf interpreter) who then interprets to the Deaf recipient.
This is a fantastic point. Learning about CDIs really helped me understand the chasm between written and spoken languages versus sign languages.
For example, writing a program that leverages NLP to provide real-time captioning doesn't necessarily make the content as accessible as you'd think.
This parent-commenter is correct, ASL is a completely separate language from spoken English. Many people who are raised with ASL as their first language prefer seeing ASL rather than reading English.
Modern ASL includes elements of "signed English" but it it's own language, the third most common in the US.
I am a hearing person, so take my understanding of this with a grain of salt. Here is a Deaf primary resource to describe the difference.
I think the best argument for having government press conferences with a video of somebody doing sign language is that it underscores that something might be a super serious situation that literally everybody needs to know about as a matter of immediate life and death and it would get peoples' attention who might not otherwise notice that something was serious. That benefit is arguably nullified though when every press conference has them.
Personally speaking though, I'm against using them in about 99.999% of situations that are not imminent life and death emergencies. The gesturers' motions can be super distracting to the point that it makes the normal political process harder to focus on. It's just distracting enough (IMO) that important details about the normal everyday government business can be missed.
> That benefit is arguably nullified though when every press conference has them... Personally speaking though, I'm against using them in about 99.999% of situations that are not imminent life and death emergencies.
The benefit is including deaf people, not just making sure that they're able to comprehend emergency alerts (though that is also important). While I agree that the system could be refined, another part of me likes it because it gives visibility to something that the vast majority of hearing people wouldn't know about otherwise.
Anecdotally, my partner's parents can read and write English but aren't fluent in it. The prevalence of interpreters in the past few years has made things accessible to them that wouldn't have been in the past. From what I've heard, they aren't alone in their experience.
Hypothetically anything could be government waste, but adding a little accessibility feature doesn't seem like a huge project, right? They have to hire a translator for an afternoon, and then embed some videos into their site.
And if they have the virtue of supporting accessibility, why shouldn't they signal that? It seems like it would be helpful info, if you were deaf and thinking of visiting, to know that the local government was at least trying. I mean hypothetically they could be lying, but in that case the issue still isn't virtual signaling, it would just be the lie.
The site is in Spanish, but the idea of the post is easy to understand anyway. [Hi from Argentina!]
If you hover your mouse over the menus, they expand and show the text in sing language in a gif. [It may be the local/latam/spanish version instad of the USA version. I don't know neither.]
Anyway, is this useful for deaf people? How many deaf can understand sign languages but not understand written language? I think there are a few gramar and idiom differences, but I don't expect that to be a problem. It may be useful for small children, but it's the site of the city of Bogotá, so I expect that all users are adults.
> I think there are a few gramar and idiom differences
Sign languages are unrelated to spoken languages: they're not just sign representations of existing languages like English and Spanish, they are independent languages. But deaf people do learn to read spoken languages in school, essentially as a foreign language.
Yeah, that is a confusing element to explain about sign languages. For example, Spanish Sign Language is called that because it's a language regional to Spain, not because it's related to Spanish.
sign languages are not universal, they are just a parallel set of languages. ASL isn't a blanket term for sign language, especially in the context of a non-English nexus.
Note my specific contrast of ASL vs English. General statements about sign languages (such as calling them "parallel" languages) are frequently inaccurate. The comment you responded to is a counterexample to a generalization.
Nobody was talking about English before you except to illustrate how they dont map one to one in a variety of languages. But I can acknowledge your contribution to this thread.
No, they're unrelated in exactly the same way that the English language and Chinese language are unrelated. There may be lots of vocabulary overlap (in the form of finger-spellings) but the grammar and basic vocabulary have independent origins.
I’m speaking out of my expertise here, but my understanding is some deaf people don’t consider written English, Spanish, etc. to be their “native language”, like their variant of signing is.
As a non-deaf person (but with hearing loss), I find that to be a little excessive for a website (a something roughly equivalent to a book), but to each their own.
> my understanding is some deaf people don’t consider written English, Spanish, etc. to be their “native language”, like their variant of signing is
This is interesting and I wonder what their “native language” written version is. As a native English speaker, written English isn’t native to me either but it’s the written expression of my language. If someone learns ASL, isn’t English also the written representation of their “spoken” language?
> If someone learns ASL, isn’t English also the written representation of their “spoken” language?
No, because the grammar is completely different. In many cases it isn't possible to literally translate a sentence between ASL and English, so a trained interpreter would instead try to convey the general sentiment.
My partner often describes sign languages as a completely different modality; deaf people's dreams tend to be completely different than hearing people's dreams, for example.
What’s the written representation of ASL? Is it really a preference to use glyphs instead of letters?
I’m not sure what dreams has to do with written representations. I’m not hard of hearing and I don’t dream in writing and sounds are completely different in my dreams than waking life.
> What’s the written representation of ASL? Is it really a preference to use glyphs instead of letters?
That's the thing: unlike most spoken languages, sign languages don't have written equivalents. Deaf people often use the written language of their local community, however, someone who speaks Spanish Sign Language writing in Spanish has more to do with geography than linguistics.
> I’m not sure what dreams has to do with written representations. I’m not hard of hearing and I don’t dream in writing and sounds are completely different in my dreams than waking life.
My point was that their brains experience and process information differently than hearing people: it isn't just that sign languages are visual while spoken languages are audible. It's difficult to understand why and how deaf people's experiences differ without talking to an actual deaf person.
There are written equivalents for sign languages, although their use is controversial among some (but not all) Deaf people. Spoken language is essentially one-dimensional: it’s a series of phonemes (and tones, even in non-tonal language—consider the difference between “It’s here.” and “It’s here?") in a chronological order. The movements that make up sign language are a bit more difficult to represent in that one-dimensional sequence, although not impossible. I imagine that millennia ago when written languages were created, there was similar resistance to replacing sounds with marks on mud/bone/stone/bark/etc.
> There are written equivalents for sign languages, although their use is controversial among some (but not all) Deaf people.
Interesting, I haven't encountered any in my neck of the woods (albeit I am hearing and not really active in of deaf communities outside of family). Do you know what the most "popular" written equivalents would be?
I don't think it's impossible to represent sign languages in written form, either via existing languages like English or newly developed glyphs and symbols. However, people often don't seem to understand how complex deaf culture and languages are, likely because deaf communities can be quite insular (either by choice or because of discrimination/isolation), which makes it a difficult problem to discuss. Developing a fluent method of bidirectional communication between hearing an deaf people requires a fair bit of empathy, and I suspect the only people who really understand both deaf and hearing 'culture' are codas[0]; that said, I'd hope that raising awareness about common misconceptions would go a long way.
The main one is Sutton SignWriting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting I first learned about its existence from a book by Doyald Young where he showed his design for the first font for SignWriting.
As a Hard of Hearing individual, the lack of empathy, let alone accommodation, for people with hearing loss is staggering.
Does this exist? I always assumed that sign language was taught after reading and writing. I wonder how common it is to have someone proficient in sign language but illiterate.
For children born deaf, sign language can be (and should be) their first language. It turns out, incidentally, that a baby’s ability to form signs comes earlier than their ability to vocalize, even for hearing children, so there are benefits for using sign language even with hearing children. My children learned some basic signs as infants (water, bathroom, more). I really need to get on the ball about learning ASL properly (and my family as well since they’ll need it just as much as me) since my cochleae are on an ineluctable road to deafness and at some point, maybe ten years, maybe thirty, maybe never, I will be unable to hear instead of being merely hearing impaired.
> I always assumed that sign language was taught after reading and writing.
Sign languages are often people's first language. If you're like me, you probably learned english as a toddler through magic and were later enrolled in school where you refined your spoken and written abilities. For many deaf children english is a second language.
> Anyway, is this useful for deaf people? How many deaf can understand sign languages but not understand written language?
When I was doing accessibility work, I was told point-blank by a deaf person that the reading comprehension of the average deaf person was quite poor, because to a deaf person English is their second language. (Their first language being, of course, sign language.)
With that in mind, we should think of it like the average English-reader’s ability to correctly comprehend Bogotá’s web site: A few will be fluent, but large portion won’t be able to understand it at all.
To anyone confused: sign languages are distinct languages in and of themselves, with their own etymology, not simply a visual medium for existing languages. My understanding is that it's many deaf people's preferred method of communication, even if they can also read and write; some deaf people can read lips, but most don't.
Unfortunately, many older deaf people were denied access to education and thus cannot read or write fluently in other languages. COVID was actually a huge improvement in accessibility for deaf people as major governments and news organizations started including sign language interpreters in their broadcasts.
I suspect there aren't many academic sources detailing the discrimination faced by deaf people, though there might be compilations of first-hand accounts. The deaf community is fairly insular.
My partner's father was born in India as the eldest of several boys. Despite his family being well-off, he was treated as a burden and most of his family refused to learn IPSL to be able to communicate with him. His mother and father weren't supportive of his personal, academic, or business pursuits; his brothers all went to prestigious foreign universities and became highly educated. He made his own way to Canada where he learned his 4th and 5th languages, ASL and English, and started a family with a deaf girl his family had arranged a marriage to. The man has gumption, but was never really able to escaped the poverty line.
I'm not sure about illiteracy rates, but generally I think it is well known that the education system doesn't serve deaf students as well as their hearing counterparts. Note that the second link tries to debunk a statistic, but really more contextualizes it to not look so bad.
Also worth pointing out that there’s not one sign language. ASL (American sign language) and BSL (British sign language) are different languages from each other, and from English as well.
Absolutely. There are accents, idioms, and even different signs for the same word that may vary between region, generation, and personal history with the language. e.g a southerner can likely guess someone is from the northeast with high confidence and vice versa. People raised Deaf can often tell if another person is hearing, or someone who was raised mainstream without access to sign language until later in life.
There can also be family/hyperlocale idioms or even individual signs that won’t be readily understood outside the group; I think this is true for most languages as forms of inside jokes and the like.
Two words in ASL that I’ve noted have a few distinct signs in different areas are strawberry and mean (“he is a mean person”).
If by accent, you mean an idiolect, perhaps, but such an "accent" is likely limited to families or in-jokes among friends. Geographic differences in sign languages are more comparable to differences in dialects. Thus, some sign languages are more mutually intelligible than others.
It seems inevitable that slight changes of gesture or angle or rhythm would emerge in isolated signing populations, analogous to the way accents develop in isolated speaking populations.
But only the menus are translated to a sign language (I don't know which one). The actual content of the site is not. So the question of how is this useful remains.
This is cute, but not useful as deaf/mute people can read. Also, doesn't translate properly (remember, different countries tend to have different sign languages).
Why are you assuming this doesn’t translate? I would assume that the government at least has a sign language interpreter that would notice that page is wrong within a minute of using it.
> Not all of them can: that's why accessibility is important.
No, that’s why education is important.
If they can’t read, that’s a failure of education; fix it there.
That’s a lot cheaper and more effective than trying to force the entire world to publish sign-language gif pop-ups as an accessibility measure on their written documents.
> The education system shouldn’t only serve children and is part of a lifelong process.
I agree. Unfortunately, in many places it barely serves children, let alone the rest of the community.
But this is tangential to my original point, which is that reasonable accommodations are good and that you can improve accessibility and education at the same time.
What about non-deaf people who can’t read? How do they experience the site?
Isn’t accessibility important for non-readers? I would expect there are more illiterate people who can hear than dead people who are illiterate.
Either way, it seems like the best way for the site to accommodate visitors is to use accessibility features so their written content can be used by screen readers for the sight impaired but also sign language displayers for people who prefer sign language and text to speech for people who can’t read but can hear.
I don’t think accessibility should be binary for one or the other but dedicating resources to visual sign language seems like a luxury that most sites can’t afford.
> Either way, it seems like the best way for the site to accommodate visitors is to use accessibility features so their written content can be used by screen readers for the sight impaired but also sign language displayers for people who prefer sign language and text to speech for people who can’t read but can hear.
While the implementation could definitely be improved, I can't fault them for trying. Perhaps stuff like this will be streamlined in the next decade.
> I don’t think accessibility should be binary for one or the other but dedicating resources to visual sign language seems like a luxury that most sites can’t afford.
You could make the same argument about making sites compatible with screen readers — and many do. At the end of the day, I think it's reasonable for government services to be held to a higher standard of accessibility.
In the US there is a standard in the ADA called section 508 that specifies what is required.
I can fault them for trying if their failure makes it harder for people to access the site. At the end of the day there’s a fixed dev budget and if it’s spent on one thing and misses other important things that’s bad. It is nice that they have good intentions and it’s better than nothing. But they should be faulted so they can correct the fault and do better next time.
> But they should be faulted so they can correct the fault and do better next time.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. They're clearly trying to do better as this is a fairly novel approach. Is it perfect? No. But I'm puzzled by the weirdly negative and aggressive reaction this is getting.
Deaf people are often neglected and forgotten about. My partner's father is deaf and when he visits government services, had medical appointments, etc., they almost never provide an interpreter — despite it being a legal requirement he requests in advance which is fully subsidized — because they assume that writing stuff down on paper or making vague gestures is adequate. If awareness and accessibility for deaf people is this bad in a major Canadian metropolitan area, imagine how bad it is in smaller areas and countries.
My point is that there are accessibility standards. If a site doesn’t follow them and instead does something else, even with good intentions, that should be pointed out so they do better next time.
I don’t think I feel terribly negative other than if the goal is to accommodate dead people then the site made a poor decision that whirl accommodating some dead people made it harder for other people who need different accessibilities.
I don’t think the issue is awareness so much as accommodation. I think resources are better spent on solving the problems that can be solved rather than raising awareness.
> I don’t think the issue is awareness so much as accommodation. I think resources are better spent on solving the problems that can be solved rather than raising awareness.
This is a false dichotomy: we can do both. And I respectfully disagree about the issue not being awareness. The comments on this post itself demonstrates the lack of awareness and understanding about deaf people's experience.
I suspect people misinterpret me pointing out that a group has been historically discriminated against and denied education, or at least not being provided accommodations that allow them to participate, as being bigoted.
A lot of people don't realize that the dominant language of a country is usually a deaf person's second or third language. Thus, they may be more comfortable speaking in their first language, sign language (which is regional and not one global language*).
Roughly half of the illiteracy rate in Germany is due to migrants who are not native German speakers. Framing this as a failure of the educational system would be rather ignorant, as that's at most half of the problem.
I thought they be doing something interesting to match video background with background color of element it is displayed on, but alas, each video has appropriate background baked in.
I think is nice how teach us that are deaf people with the same needings like us, that we are not deaf.
Visibilization and inclusion, even when they can read properly.
I'm not seeing this as a waste of money (of course it could be anyway)
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the reason that this feels like a combination of government-waste and possibly virtue-signaling is that only the column headings seem to be sign-translated. Even if it lets some people know that they click on the tourism or jobs or culture section of the website, the content within those pages doesn't seem to be sign-translated. So how does it really help anybody? Hell, can you even get to this website in the first place if you can't read?
And I don't know how Columbia's Internet works, but if you can read and aren't wealthy enough to afford fast Internet, maybe loading up videos while trying to browse the site makes the site slower and a worse experience for everybody.
Perhaps the sentiment behind this is noble, and as an experiment it sure is interesting, but I'm not convinced that it really helps as is yet. Maybe this is a foundation for something more interesting down the road, but we'll see.
PS: As a side note, while I can't read the content, the site itself looks pretty visually interesting and well-done.