The Digital Divide
Last Saturday I had the privilege of chairing a panel discussion at Deaffest, the annual film and tv festival for the Deaf community held at the Light House in Wolverhampton. The theme of the session was ‘What is the future for moving image media with sign language?’ and our panel was drawn from broadcasters, funders, policy leaders and academics. During the discussion one of the panellists, Jason Hall from Screen WM, asked the audience (who were almost all from the Deaf signing community) to put up their hands if they had ever posted a video on YouTube, be it a film, a video blog or just their mate’s birthday party. Not a single hand went up. For us on the panel this was quite significant as it hints that an important disadvantaged community in our society is not accessing the tools and platforms which could meet their communication needs. Ok, so the audience is not representative of the estimated 100,000 people who use British Sign Language as their first language, and YouTube is not everyone’s communication tool, but I do think this warrants further research.
Tags: BSL, Deaffest, Screen WM, YouTube
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