In today's information and communication era, the World Wide Web has rapidly become a vital resource for most of us. It has been a revolution that has, in many ways, changed the way people function in today’s society and interact with each other.

It is essential for everyone to be able to access and use the web so that they can participate fully in that society. However, the information and services available on the web are not always fully accessible to many people.

Content barriers

The web provides a source of information that is primarily accessed in a text and graphical format. So deaf and hard of hearing people can get many benefits from it, whereas they may face barriers accessing other forms of information or communication that hearing people take for granted.

However, many sources of information and services available on the web today use rich multimedia content that can hinder universal access. For many deaf and hard of hearing people multimedia content can only be made accessible through the use of subtitles and/or signed versions of the multimedia content.

Content can also be hard to understand when it’s not in plain English, especially for sign language users, whose first language is often British Sign Language (BSL) and not English. BSL is the first or preferred language of over 50,000 people and is syntactically and grammatically very different to English.

How we are helping

Our New Technologies team is working with technology communities, standards bodies, regulators and governments worldwide to create guidelines to help make the web more accessible to all. We are also trying to influence website owners and designers.

One challenge for website designers and owners is delivering signed content. Sign language users would benefit from having relevant content available to them in their first language, which is sign language. It is possible to record a video clip of a signer and put that on the website, but this only offers a partial solution.

Sign language interpreters are a scarce resource, which makes it practically impossible to produce sign language variants of even a fraction of the content on the web. And web content is volatile and often dynamic in nature, so static video recording isn't a very good solution. So RNID is working with other groups to develop virtual signers and other technologies that would allow more signed content to be delivered. We are also aiming to allow more dynamic and even transactional content to be delivered in signed format. 

Further information

You can find out more about virtual signing and the related projects that we have been involved with elsewhere in this section of the website. You can also contact us by email at ict@rnid.org.uk.