International Week of Deaf People

International Week of Deaf People is celebrated annually during the last full week of September, promoting the human rights of deaf people worldwide. It was first launched by the World Federation of the Deaf in 1958 and culminates in the International Day of Sign Languages on 23 September.

The deaf community is diverse, and access needs vary widely depending on whether sign language is a person’s first language, when they became deaf, and how they prefer to communicate. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s user story for Dhruv, a mature student who is deaf, describes one experience: a sign language user studying online who relies on human-typed real-time captions in lectures, edited captions on assigned videos, the ability to adjust caption size, colour and position, and “pinned” interpreter video in conferencing apps. Auto-generated captions can help but cause problems when they’re available but inaccurate, especially with specialist vocabulary, and lip reading is unreliable and exhausting.

Websites that work well for people with similar access needs provide accurate, human-reviewed captions on all video and audio content, allow users to adjust caption size, contrast and position, offer transcripts as well as captions, and support sign language interpretation in live video by letting users pin or enlarge an interpreter’s feed. They also use clear writing and good structure, because for many deaf people sign language is their first language and dense written text takes extra effort.