Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

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.

Hover over one of the sign-language symbols and see video of a person signing to provide information.

> Columbia's

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.

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.

> American Sign Language (ASL) is completely unrelated to written and spoken English

Do you have any resources that could explain this different more fully?

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.

https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/history8.htm

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.

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.

This PDF has some recommendations for how to make web pages accessible for deaf users. Page 13 explains why they recommend having sign language.

http://www.insor.gov.co/home/wp-content/uploads/filebase/rec...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com