What to do if face masks are being worn in your child’s school

The National Deaf Children's Society offers advice in this video to British parents on the difficulties for deaf children attending schools where face coverings are used in classrooms or in communal areas.

UK TV personality: My Deaf Brother's "living hell"

British television personality Josie Gibson was emotional on the show This Morning as she talked about the difficulties faced by her deaf brother, Harry. She calls his experiences during the pandemic a "living hell." Gibson, who won the 11th season of Big Brother. points to the difficulty of being able to lip-read while people are using face masks. Ironically, the video does not have captions but here is part of what she said:

We are so privileged to be able to still communicate even though we wear a face mask. Imagine going into a shop and be totally cut off from everybody in that shop Not only do they use it - lip reading - to communicate, they use the whole bottom part as expression. They won't know if people are trying to talk to them, if people are trying to get their attention. They don't know how people are feeling - they wouldn't know the emotion of that person because they're just so cut off from that person. Everywhere, we're told wear mask, save lives, but we've forgotten about this community where these masks are making their lives a living hell.

Nurse learning BSL for patients

UK nurse Dawn Bebbington is learning British Sign Language to improve the service she provides for deaf patients. The BBC has a video report.

Deaf Poet Sahera Khan

Deaf poet Sahera Khan invites viewers behind the scenes of making her video BSL poem Hurts Me followed by a reading of the poem with voiceover is provided by Kuli Kohli.

Inventing sign language for space

British sign language is receiving an astronomical update thanks to a unique collaboration between a space scientist and a group of deaf astronomers. The BBC video below explains more.

The Deaf are being 'excluded from astronomy'

An astrophysicist in the UK is leading a project to develop 50 new BSL signs to help explain her research. Olja Panic says, "The deaf community risks being excluded from aspects of modern science because the number of new advances is outpacing the development of sign language to explain them." Read the full story at Phys.org here.

Sainsbury’s turns store into signing supermarket

Sainsbury’s, one of the UK's largest supermarkets, turned one of its stores into a signing supermarket. It was renamed “Signsbury’s” for the three-day project. Read more about it here.

Inventing sign language for deaf scientists

The BBC has a video report on Liam Mcmulkin, a deaf student who was frustrated by the lack of sign language for scientific terms—so he invented his own.

The Stand-up Comic Bringing Deaf Culture to Hearing People

Greek-born but Edinburgh-based comedian Leah Kalaitzi uses British Sign Language (BSL) and an interpreter to spread Deaf Culture. In a video called Silent Laughs, the Scottish Documentary Institute follows Kalaitzi to the stage.

A Signed Bedtime Story Goes Viral

CBeebies Bedtime Story is a BBC show where a celebrity reads a children's bedtime story. A recent episode got extra attention because the celebrity, Catastrophe's Rob Delaney, signed in Makaton his story a week ago Friday. Delaney read aloud and signed Ten in a Bed by Penny Dale, becoming the first reader to do so. It caught the attention of six-year-old Tom McCartney. Watch Tom's reaction below in a video that went viral:



Delaney wanted to honor his son by telling bedtime story in Makaton, which is a variation of BSL (British Sign Language) combining signs and symbols Delaney learned Makaton in order to communication with his son, Henry, who couldn't speak and died last January at the age of two.

When a deaf singer gets death threats from other deaf people, something’s wrong

Freelance journalist Josh Salisbury makes a plea in the Guardian that deaf people "need to move beyond the oralism v sign language split." It was that divide, he tells readers, that has led to the social media backlash against America’s Got Talent finalist Mandy Harvey. Salisbury writes:

It also risks promoting a myth of a militant deaf community, acting as jealous gatekeepers of what it really means to be deaf. A casual observer reading the story about Harvey could be forgiven for thinking that the deaf community, in America or elsewhere, is far more intolerant than it really is.

Read the full story here.

The first deaf-led theatre company in the UK

Paula Garfield was frustrated with the barriers facing deaf actors. So she did something about it: Garfield started the first deaf-led theatre company in the UK. Fifteen years later, Deafinitely Theatre is still going strong. She writes:

Over the years I became disillusioned with the world of acting, and theatre more generally, having experienced a lack of deaf awareness and bullying from others in the industry. One year-long tour took a particular toll on me. As the only deaf member of the company I was ignored and poorly treated by my fellow actors and made to feel that, as a deaf person, I should be grateful I’d been offered the work in the first place.

Read her full story in the Independent here.

Annoying Questions

Cut.com asked a group of BSL users to share some of the annoying questions they get from hearing people. Among the questions: “Can you drive?” and “Can you read and write?”

Deaf woman: all the stupid questions she's been asked

A Scottish woman named Bea shares in a video inappropriate questions she has gotten from people because she is deaf. The video was posted by BBC Social.

Deaf Boy to be allowed to Stay in UK

We told you recently about a "six-year-old deaf boy who fled Iraq with his family after ISIS threatened to kill disabled children." His parents were told he would have to leave the UK. Here's an update: Lawand Hamadamin "has been given a last minute reprieve to stay in Britain," according to The Telegraph. His brother and parents had settled into Derby where he learned British Sing Language at the Royal School for the Deaf. Read more from The Telegraph here.

BSL and social media

There was a time when sign language users had to go to a local club to shoot the breeze, share advice or have any kind of conversation, reports the BBC. But social media, particularly Facebook has changed everything. It's a look at the impact of Facebook on British Sign Language in the video below. You can read the story here.

Short Film: The Kiss

A short film about a deaf couple and a hearing couple has won several awards at Film Festivals. Charlie Swinbourne's The Kiss took Best Film and Best Script honors at the Basque Region Festival of Deaf Arts and Films.

Baby registered with a sign name

Image from BSL Zone video

Tomato Lichy and Paula Garfield are both Deaf. They gave their second child the English name Hazel. At first the government balked at their attempt to register the baby’s British Sign Language name. But with a lawyer's help, that has changed. Now, the child's name, written in sign notation as UbOtDDstarL, is listed on her birth certificate. The family explains what happened in their own words in a video here.

Getting to know... BSL

British Sign Language or BSL is used by most signers in the UK - a group numbering between 50 and 70,000 people. The earliest British account of signing dates back to a wedding in 1575, where the groom used signs during the ceremony. Samuel Pepys's account of the great fire of London in 1666 refers to a 'dumb' boy who describes the fire using "strange signs". This 'home signing', as it is known, was an ad hoc gesturing system developed by deaf children which would not have been passed down generations or across deaf communities. In 1760, Edinburgh teacher Thomas Braidwood started Braidwood's Academy for the Deaf and Dumb which is considered the first school for the deaf in Britain. The sign language he used later became British Sign Language.

Generating respect for BSL

"It's hard work being a self-employed BSL teacher, but I love it," Ayesha Gavin says. Gavin, the owner of Ayesha Communications, writes in the Guardian, "I see people develop confidence when communicating, enjoying themselves and knowing that one day they may become a qualified professional and gain a great career. To any deaf people aspiring to be teachers, know your rights and fight for them. Deafness may hold you back but only if you let it." Read more here.