Abilities
British Sign Language (BSL) is the preferred language of over 87,000 Deaf people in the UK for whom English may be a second or third language. Sign languages are fully functional and expressive languages; at the same time, they differ profoundly from spoken languages. BSL is a visual-gestural language with a distinctive grammar using handshapes, facial expressions, gestures and body language to convey meaning. Source: BDA
Microsoft commissioned independent interviews with British Sign Language (BSL) users in 2021. One lady signed “I was born Deaf. I have never heard English. I am not oral. My education was in sign language. You tell me, in what sense is English my second language?”.
Dr Kate Rowley, from the University of Wolverhampton, said: “Print literacy levels in the deaf population, whether they have been orally or manually educated, have not improved in the last fifty years.
“One study reported that 16-year-old deaf school leavers in the UK had an average reading age of 9 years and recent studies show little improvement in the last forty years.”
Using assistive technology means website owners can easily create in-vision sign language versions of the text, in addition to captioning videos.