Liam O’Dell: 2023 could be the year the UK Government finally accounts for its dire BSL access (BSL)

Happy New Year. 2022 has been and gone, and it sure was quite the year for Deaf rights. We had the passing of the British Sign Language (BSL) Act (more on that shortly), Deaf signers on juries, and NHS hearing aids being available to everyone again – to name just three examples.

Back in December 2021, I looked ahead to last year and what it might have in store for us Deaf folk. “If 2021 was the year we asserted our rights,” the headline read, “2022 is the year we strengthen them”. Clearly, that’s happened, and it’s time to look ahead to what another year on this planet will give us.

First things first, I think our rights will continue to be strengthened, but to the extent that it can help us hold organisations accountable which have long ignored us and discriminated against us. The UK Government, of course, is an easy and immediate example, as it continues to fail to provide a BSL interpreter for its press conferences.

This continued exclusion of our community could soon come back to bite them, though – in two ways.

First, we have the ongoing court case regarding whether 276 Deaf people should be compensated over nine inaccessible Covid briefings. We’re still waiting for the judge’s decision on whether the claim was made within the necessary timeframes – which could be either a simple ‘yes’ and the claim going to trial in the summer; ‘no’, but the judge makes an exception given the nature of the case; or ‘no’ and the claim is thrown out. Those close to the case seem hopeful it will progress further when the time comes for the judge to make his decision.

If the case goes all the way, of course, then it’ll come with a significant financial cost for the government – one which, if it’s agreed, will hopefully and finally make them sit up and pay attention when it comes to the rights of Deaf people.

However that court case turns out, there is also another way in which the UK Government could be embarrassed into action.

The first of the BSL reports on the ‘promotion and facilitation’ of the language by UK Government departments, mandated by the BSL Act which passed last year, is due by around 31 June this year at the latest. It could certainly make for awkward reading given how press conferences have continued to come with insufficient BSL access, and they would have to confess to that fact. The report should hopefully be debated by MPs upon its publication, too.

Elsewhere, if the latest postponement is to be believed, we’ll finally be consulted on a BSL GCSE and its draft subject content. On this issue, we can give the Department for Education a resounding ‘yes’ to moving forward on something which should have been sorted many years ago.

Finally, this is more of a wish and ambition more than something I am very much certain about, like the above. There were far too many stories last year – and the years prior, too, of course – of Deaf people experiencing poor accessibility to healthcare, with multiple clear breaches of the Accessible Information Standard. I pray this year offers up opportunities to strengthen access in this area, too.

I’ve probably said this before, but there’s a growing visibility and momentum around deafness now which has been a long time coming. 2023, if it goes our way, could be quite the contrast to the catastrophic rollback of rights we saw in the 2020 pandemic year.

Let us move forward with the hope and ambition I know so many of us Deaf folk have.

Photo: Ollie Cole.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.