Deaf News: International deaf education webinar criticised over lack of accessibility

The Global Coalition of Parents of Children who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (GPODHH) has come under fire from the deaf community after hosting a live discussion without Deaf parents or sign language interpreters present.

‘A Global Conversation about Education’, which was streamed live on Facebook on Friday, only came with English captioning for a portion of the event.

Sharing the event announcement on Twitter, deaf student Aaron Wise said it makes them “uncomfortable as a deaf adult”.

“A conference for parents of deaf/HoH children, and the ‘professionals who work with them’ discussing how to support deaf/HoH children, that’s all in spoken English with no sign language interpretation. Also not deaf led,” they wrote.

This makes me uncomfortable as a deaf adult.
A conference for /parents/ of deaf/HoH children, and the "professionals who work with them" discussing how to support deaf/HoH children, that's all in spoken english with no sign language interpretation. Also not deaf led? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/8OmXQgZXeR

— Aaron Wise (@TheDeafWise) August 24, 2020

Responding to the tweet, other deaf Twitter users compared the event to the Milan Conference, held in 1880.

Organised by the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, attendees declared that oral education was better than ‘manual’, sign education, before passing a resolution to ban sign language in schools.

Ahead of the livestream, The Limping Chicken approached GPODHH about the lack of sign language interpretation, with member Janet DesGeorges saying it was a discussion which the coalition had ‘at length’.

“We realize that this event is limited in only being able to do this in English and English captioning. We hope in the future to expand our accessibility.

“We felt that, at the very least, providing captioning would be a starting point. We know this is not always the preference of D/HH users, preferring sign language as their accessibility, and we are open to any suggestions on how to provide sign language in the future in many different signing languages from a volunteer organization such as GPODHH,” she said.

However, the broadcast itself came with limited captioning, after auto-generated captions from Facebook failed to load.

The coalition instead used speech recognition from WebCaptioner.com, which only captured the voice of DesGeorges.

“So that is going to make things a little more complicated than we had anticipated, because one of our top priorities is rendering our webinars and anything we do as a coalition accessible to our audience,” she said.

DesGeorges went on to transcribe contributions from other panellists in the comments section of the video.

The situation prompted further criticism from viewers, with one user, Kathryn Pearson, writing that the event should not have taken place “without full accessibility”.

“It would have been better to postpone and make a better experience for all, it would have caused far less hurt,” she said.

Meanwhile, Emma Horton queried the Deaf representation on the webinar.

“How can you have the audacity to be discussing a group you’re not allowing to speak for themselves?! Ridiculous,” she commented.

Addressing the remarks, DesGeorges said the coalition are all volunteers and ‘we are doing the best that we can’.

“We did try to secure two ISL [International Sign Language] interpreters, but unfortunately, we were unable to do.

“So we would like to thank you in advance for listening to the message that we’re trying to convey to everyone by trialling what captions we have tried to make available.

“By reading the comments that are in the captions box, we are extremely aware that we need to do better and we need to be better, but we have to start somewhere.

“Right now, we hope that those few people we are able to reach, are able to get some good information from what we’re trying to do, so thank you for your patience once again,” she said.

The full webinar can be found on GPODHH’s official Facebook page.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.