Interview: Sign-language takes to the web

Malcolm Wright

IT Week: As chief executive of sign-language services provider SignPost, can you explain why web sites need live signing?

Malcolm Wright: I always thought that the deaf can read subtitles, so it wouldn't matter [if sites do not offer sign language], but there are about 70,000 people in the UK who use British Sign Language [BSL] as a primary means of communication. It's not a straight translation of English – it has its own word order, grammar and morphology – so English is often a very poor second language to them.

But is sign language well-suited to the web?

The net is a fantastic way of creating a new social inclusion of minority groups; and deaf communities are quick to adopt new technologies and adapt them as a hybrid of their own. Now that we have the capability to stream pictures across space, there has been a growing demand from the deaf community for access to web sites.
How does your streaming media technology work – would people need to have very fast broadband connections to access it?

There was a degree of scepticism in the beginning whether download speeds would be regular [enough] and whether the technology could stream pictures of a high enough quality for it to be an intelligible means of communication. But the firm we work with, Global Fibre, solved that problem so we could provide clear quality at low broadband speeds of less than 512kbit/s. We also produce BSL in a TV broadcast-quality environment so it is perfectly lit, and that makes a big difference.

Has does your signing system sit alongside the accessibility standards of the W3C web standards body?

The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative [WAI] concentrated on the blind and partially sighted. Many people are under the misapprehension it also covers the deaf. As far as we're aware, our web site was the first that was fully bilingual in BSL and English, when it was launched in 2002. We also drew up the protocols on how sites which want to include BSL should use it, including the size, background colours, and positioning [of the signer] on the page – all the things that are considered for the blind and partially sighted, we pioneered for using BSL on the internet.

Could this become a standard?

We hope to work with the W3C on drawing up an international set of sign language protocols next year. It makes sense to have guidelines which are understandable and have been informed by the deaf community, not technicians.

Shouldn't the government legislate to encourage this, as it has with accessibility in other areas?

The problem with the Disability Discrimination Act was the phrase "as resources allow", which was, from a cynical point of view, a wonderful let-out clause. As an ITV business, we're hoping to work with the government to create sign language access that the community needs, but we recognise that there can't be an open cheque book because it would be very expensive and [perhaps impossible] to translate the whole of the world's information into BSL for the web. The corporate world may take over once it realises there is such a thing as the deaf pound. It's a niche market and the early adopters will corner it.