Bogotá's website has sign language titles
bogota.gov.co
bogota.gov.co
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.
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.
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 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.
Do you have any resources that could explain this different more fully?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Colombia.
I correct this at 80% of coffee shops I go to. Yeah, I’m that guy.
I went to Colombia in the early 2000s and adored it (I’m British), so this gets my goat.
If I was a resident of Congo, I would appreciate it when people corrected this error. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
http://www.insor.gov.co/home/wp-content/uploads/filebase/rec...
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’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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a Hard of Hearing individual, the lack of empathy, let alone accommodation, for people with hearing loss is staggering.
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.
Basically, you're saying "I always assumed that speaking was taught after reading and writing." (which can happen, but is far from being the norm)
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.
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.
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.
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 would assume close to 100% of deaf people will learn to read that language, but it should still be remembered it's a second language to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_Sign_Langu...
So it would be good to share the stats you use to understand how dead people have elevated rates of illiteracy.
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.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15454499/
http://www.redeafined.com/2012/04/debunking-fourth-grade-rea...
http://www.insor.gov.co/home/wp-content/uploads/filebase/rec...
Not all of them can: that's why accessibility is important.
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.
Also...
> More than 6 million adults in Germany struggle to read and write simple texts in German, a new study has found.
Can they read enough to navigate some menus in German?
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*).
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.
> If they can’t read, that’s a failure of education; fix it there.
You can tackle more than one thing at a time. Improving the education system doesn't necessarily help older generations, for example.
My community has many education and training programs for people of all ages. Even ones targeted at helping retirement age seniors read.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to incorrectly assume that the education system only serves kids.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'm not seeing this as a waste of money (of course it could be anyway)
Visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/business/accessibility/ and click the signing hands icon to see synchronous BSL