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Watching various COVID-related briefings, I notice there is always a sign language interpreter. This is clearly necessary, yet thinking about all the conferences I've attended in the past, literally none of them have had a sign language interpreter.
How do conferences work for deaf scientists? Do deaf scientists simply not attend conferences? If so, how does one even work in fields such as computer science where conferences are an integral part of the academic experience?
I am neither a deaf scientist nor an organizer for conferences. However, I was a student and staff member at a university with a significant deaf population so I'll speak from that perspective.
The prevalence of interpreters and other accommodations for those with disabilities varied significantly. It was a given that American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters would be present at large scale events and presentations aimed at the community as a whole. Additionally, interpreters would be provided for deaf students taking classes taught in spoken English.
Beyond that, it was usually the responsibility of the deaf person to arrange for an interpreter; though many interpreters were employed by the university, there was no guarantee one would be available on short notice. This may explain why I seldom saw interpreters at club meetings and other smaller events, especially those that emphasized spontaneous direct communication. For example, interpreters were present at the anime club where much of the activities involved watching Japanese animation with subtitles, but I did not see any at the club for tabletop role playing games where interpersonal interaction was constant.
In short, students and staff had the accommodations necessary to fulfill their primary goal(s) but often not enough for secondary ones, such as socialization. I suspect a similar dynamic applies to scientific conferences.
Conferences that regularly have deaf people attending likely organize interpreters themselves but the rest will only provide accommodations when requested. (In other words, at a typical conference, you're not going to see an ASL interpreter unless there's at least one deaf person present!) The effectiveness of such accommodations are apt to suffer if the organizers lack experience and/or resources. This would discourage deaf people from attending unless the conference was essential - for example, a topic of particular interest is being discussed or a colleague is in need of material or moral support - or had a positive reputation of proper accommodations.
In summary, the attendance of deaf scientists at conferences is presumably dictated by the following:
In what was a very large astronomy conference I have seen a sign language interpreter (actually they had two, who round swap every few minutes during the talk) in certain sessions (presumably going to the sessions which the deaf scientist(s) was attending). I haven't seen this at other conferences, but whether that is because of their smaller sizes or because deaf scientists didn't attend I don't know.
They do not work. Most conferences in most fields of science do not work well for people with any sensory/communication disabilities.
A few online conferences offer automatically generated captions. These help some but they are not very accurate.
Edit: The fact that conferences are ableist is not because they are intentionally ableist, but rather because of ignorance. Many conference organizers would be willing to adjust their conferences if they knew how to do so and had the funds.
In spite of what Anonymous Physicist says, conference can work for deaf scientists. This is the case in my own area of work, digital accessibility.
There are two main methods to make conferences accessible for deaf attendants:
For congenitally deaf persons, sign language translation is preferable, since that represents translation into their native language (except if the translation is into International Sign), whereas written language is essentially a foreign language.
Research into sign language avatars has been ongoing for quite some time, but I have never seen them in action at conferences.
The above is about deaf scientists in the audience. What about deaf scientists giving a talk?
In 19 years of research in accessibility, I have seen this only once. It was a congenitally deaf researcher from Finland who gave a talk in English. His pronunciation was only marginally harder to understand than that of many other non-native speakers of English, i.e. something one could get used to within minutes. The only issue was that he did not know how loud he was talking, so he asked he wasn't talking to loud. After feedback from the audience, he started talking less loudly.
(The conferences I am referring to include ICCHP / International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, where translation was into International Sign, the e-Accessibility Forums in Paris (transcription), events organised by the Swedish organisation Funka/FunkaNu (transcription) and conferences organised by EU-funded projects in the domain of digital accessibility.)
In most disciplines and in the larger more developed countries it's perfectly straightforward to provide real-time transcription where the speech is transcribed into text on a big screen (or streamed to a delegate's laptop or tablet).
Many deaf and hearing-impaired people do not have sign language, or fluent sign language, and as with translation between any two languages, nuance can be lost and ambiguities can be introduced in the translation from English to Sign. Sign interpretation also requires that a student maintain continuous eye contact, usually necessitating additional notetakers. Students using real-time transcription can take their own notes; the last dozen or so lines of the lecture are displayed on the transcription screen for easy reference.
(adapted from Mirabai Knight Stenography)
Using computer-assisted realtime transcription (CART) is useful not just for people with hearing impairment; people whose first language is not the same as the speaker's, or people with some specific learning difficulties, may find it useful to have a real-time transcript.
In the USA, one in seven people have hearing loss. For people over 65, that rate goes up to one in three. Events at most conferences seat hundreds of people, so statistically it’s a sure bet that at least some of those people would benefit from captioning. Even people with mild hearing loss, who do quite well in one-on-one social situations by using a combination of residual hearing, lip reading, and context clues, often have trouble with conference audio, which can be distorted in the amplification process, and which puts the speaker so far away from the audience that lipreading becomes impossible. There’s also the benefits that captioning can offer people without hearing loss, who may be more comfortable reading written English than understanding spoken English (very common when English isn’t a person’s first language), or who may have central audio processing issues (very common in Aspergers and autism) or attention deficit issues such as ADHD.
https://ccacblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/conference-captioning-ask-for-it/
And the transcript forms a useful record of the conference, and can be used by people who couldn't attend the conference because of cost or distance, or who have disabilities making travel impossible or difficult, or who are unable to obtain visas. The transcript can also be translated (or machine-translated, which may be good enough for getting the gist or deciding whether ot order a paid-for translation).
All this widens access to and participation in the conference, and means that the cost of providing the transcript can be covered by the general budget rather than being a specific cost for one or two delegates.
An example of a conference video being transcribed
https://livestream.com/accounts/686369/events/4375102/videos/100329035
And a picture of a conference with, it appears, both transcription and sign.
COVID briefings are aimed at the general public (and many Deaf people have poor English skills due to a history of bad Deaf education) and are low on jargon (hence fairly straightforward to interpret). Interpreting into the local sign language is the right choice for maximum accessibility.
For a high-jargon scientific speech to an audience of scientists, transcription may be the better option. You would need a specialist interpreter to manage such a speech; and it would be tricky for the Deaf audience member to view both the interpreter and the slides at the same time.
