So recently I’ve been noticing throughout UK train stations, new screens have been popping up which are entirely separate from the departures board. [See here](https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/british-sign-language-travel-advice-rolled-out-at-major-railway-stations). They state the time train times with someone below using sign language. As someone who isn’t deaf, I’ve found this to be very odd. **Surely if you are deaf, you can also read?** I live with noise cancelling headphones on and never listen out for train notices, I always just read the departures board. As well as this, train stations are hectic and change train schedules every second, so surely it is quicker to read the departures board?
To me it just comes across as National Rail attempting to look progressive and inclusive, without actually communicating with deaf people and asking what they want or need. It would make more sense to me to invest money in teaching station workers sign language so they can help with specific queries that way.
This could just be me having an misinformed/ableist POV. Please could someone from the deaf community/with more understanding explain if these boards help and if so why? Thank you!
Edit: I was hoping from this post to receive some illuminating answers from the deaf community/people who know more about it, which from reading them all, I have! I’m happy to know the reasons why they are beneficial, as previously I didn’t realise BSL was more of a full blown language rather than something to go alongside reading English. Education is key. Thank u!
17 comments
>Surely if you are deaf, you can also read?
Most research indicates that deaf people’s reading age is far behind that of hearing people. Which makes sense if you think about it – if you can speak English then learning to read English is just learning the system that encodes your spoken language. If you can only speak BSL then learning to read English means you have to learn English at the same time as learning to read. So, while a deaf adult might have no problems navigating a train timetable, a teenager may only have the reading ability of a young child and so struggle to navigate by text but since they have the speaking level of a teenager they can navigate via sign just fine.
British Sign Language isn’t just “English with your hands” it’s an entirely different language with its own vocabulary and grammar.
For many deaf people, BSL is their native language; while written English is a second language.
By way of analogy: imagine if you were a native English speaker, who also had a basic understanding of written Japanese.
You go to a railway station in Tokyo that has bilingual announcements and displays in English and Japanese. You might be able to understand some of the Japanese text. However, given the choice, I’m sure you’d find it much more convenient to use the English announcements and displays.
People who aren’t deaf also have PA announcements, perhaps it’s the signed equivalent of those.
The Network Rail page talks about “Travel Information” so I’d imagine it’ll be explaining disruptions, alterations, up coming engineering work, etc. Rather than just train times.
If you’ve ever emailed back and forth with someone that’s first language is BSL you’ll see that they write to you in what is essentially broken English.
“You help, problem television” is an example I remember.
You’ve probably write “Hi, can you help I’ve got a problem with my television…”
As a deaf person, I can first tell you that the majority of deaf people, including my parents, struggle to read due to the education system offering very limited support in form of communication support workers (CSWs) and interpreters.
Many deaf people who come from hearing families struggle to establish a language due to being forced to speak and not sign, causing a lack of understanding in languages. Those who chooses to sign from childhood has a language already established, making it easier for them to then learn another language.
BSL is its own language – for example in English, you would speak, ‘I am looking for platform 9 3/4, please could you direct me there?’
In BSL, we sign, ‘platform 9 3/4, where?’
Those boards also interpret announcements which don’t show on departure boards – like Ipswich being the last stop and having to transfer to a bus to Norwich, etc.
Teaching station staff BSL isn’t that simple. It takes at least a year of BSL Level 1 courses to master the most basic of BSL, and seven+ years to become a fully qualified and registered interpreter. It also costs you hundreds and thousands of pounds, which clearly in the UK, is just not affordable.
Those boards are provided by remote interpreting – the deaf community has been fighting for this kind of thing for years so we have been consulted and we wanted this.
That’s why for hearing people, these boards seems ridiculously unnecessary but for deaf people, it’s the opposite and a very much a basic human right for us all to be able to access information in the same way hearing people can.
Adding to what others have said, it’s not easy to ‘just learn’ BSL – it’s at least as hard as say French.
Fingerspelling can be very helpful if the BSL user has good English or for place names, a bit of mime goes a long way, but some deaf awareness training would be more useful – ensuring staff are aware that speech ability doesn’t correlate with deafness, that people who can hear well with hearing aids in a quiet room will likely decode nothing on a noisy station platform, and ‘just call a taxi’ doesn’t work if you can’t hear (OK, there’s apps now, but many places still don’t have those).
I was at the train station in Leeds the other day and I was wondering the exact same thing, so thanks for asking this OP, very interesting and enlightening responses!
I’m deaf. There’s two reasons for this.
A- British Sign Language is in a different order to spoken English, so for deaf people who rely fully on BSL, sometimes quickly reading something is not easy for them hence why they prefer to have an interpreter to translate for them. BSL is it’s own language 💜
B- many deaf people are from hearing families who refused to learn to sign for their kids which often led to language deprivation. So the kids growing up struggled to learn how to read and speak due to their language delay. This is not the same for all deaf kids, as some have learnt from a very young age to be able to speak and read through hours and hours of speech therapy or home tutoring, but unfortunately there are some parents who neglect, don’t have the time or money to pay for BSL lessons to communicate with their kids who may be struggling to hear properly.
It is said that if a child doesn’t learn how to communicate with another person by the age of 5, then it may be too late for them. So a lot of deaf kids with no access to the language they need to support their learning are delayed behind their hearing peers.
SSE is Spoken Sign English – the one I was raised with – where the kids have sign as their first language but spoken in the English order.
Some of the comments here explain it well too.
BSL is a language. Just because they can probably also speak English, doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from reading it in their language too.
It’s important to remember that just because you don’t find it useful, doesn’t mean it’s useless or fake progressiveness. Same goes for all those “pointless” kitchen gadgets and “lazy” pre-prepared food able-bodied people love to mock.
BSL is a language, just like English or French and for some people BSL is their first language, rather than English.
Being Deaf can make learning written English quite difficult for many reasons. This is why we have on screen interpreters as well as subtitles and adding it to screens is a great accessibility improvement.
This reminds me of the Brail signs on walls in places like MacDonalds. Are you telling me blind people are supposed to just run their hands across all the dirty surfaces until they find a sign for the toilet? Never understood that
Not all Deaf people read English. The grammar and mode of expression in BSL is *very* different from spoken or written English and if you’ve never heard English, reading it would be very difficult to pick up (as we often learn by speaking first then associating sounds).
When I had Deaf colleagues as a student, we’d often rewrite text to be in BSL (e.g. instead of ”what’s your name?” it’d be written as NAME YOU WHAT because that’s the signed order of that question). Having BSL screens makes this much easier, as instead of written it can just be signed w/mouthform and context.
EDIT: it also normalises BSL and general signed languages which is good.
I actually think this is cheaper and a more worthwhile investment, with current tech, than trying to teach everyone sign. which is harder than you might think. though teaching basic phrases and the alphabet is probably still a worthwhile investment.
Pp
As others have said, not al people have a reading ability high enough for standard text to be helpful
Also FTA
>But the main selling point is that a team of interpreters are on standby to make bespoke signed information as situations evolve or during periods of unexpected disruption.
>To me it just comes across as National Rail attempting to look progressive and inclusive, without actually communicating with deaf people and asking what they want or need.
Amazing that it’s literally them DOING something and you find that as some form of “looking like”, as stated in your article they have a whole load of accessibility improvements.
It seems that others have answered the question pretty comprehensively, but just to clarify:
>National Rail
Train stations are run by either one of the various train companies, or if it’s a major one Network Rail.
National Rail is just the website and Twitter channel, and doesn’t manage any of the actual railway infrastructure.