Face Coverings Add New Challenges To Sign Language Communication

From The Center Square:

With so many people wearing face coverings, lip readers can’t see people’s lips in order to be able to read them.

Advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing are concerned about how lip readers and people who use American Sign Language are faring in the new face-covering culture.

Ashley Lawrence, a college student at Eastern Kentucky University, who is studying education for the deaf, became concerned about the problem. To help the hearing impaired, she invented a workaround. Using her sewing machine, Lawrence created a reusable mask with a clear panel over the mouth area so that deaf and hard of hearing people can see the mouths of the people who are wearing them.

Lindsay Klarman, of the Hearing, Speech and Deaf Center of Seattle, said it is a common misconception to believe that all deaf and hard of hearing people can read lips. Some people can and some people can’t, she said.

Klarman is a fan of Lawrence’s clear-panel masks because the clear panel gives people the ability to see and interpret the speaker’s facial expressions – whether they need to read their lips or if their first language is American Sign Language.

Interpreting facial expressions is a critical component of American Sign Language, Klarman said.

The deaf and the hard of hearing are not being given the access to news that they need, Klarman worries. The deaf are as eager for COVID-19 updates as anyone else, Klarman said.

Getting the updates from news conferences on television, however, can be problematic, she said.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has had an ASL interpreter at every one of his daily news conferences since the start of the pandemic. TV broadcasters and other media outlets have been asked to include the interpreter in their coverage of the governor’s news conferences.

While some local governments have ASL interpreters available, many do not, Klarman said.

She would like to see everyone who is giving critical public information using best practices: Having an ASL interpreter on the stage as well as having captions on television screens. ASL has its own grammatical structure, in the same way that any other language does, Klarman says. So if a person’s first language is ASL, the best way to communicate with them is with an ASL interpreter, rather than with a caption in English on a screen, she said.

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