By Jean F. Andrews
Recently, I covered the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, in Greece. Here’s an update on that story.
In the Maryland Bulletin (Spring, 2015, p. 12), James E. Tucker, Superintent of the Maryland School for the deaf in Frederick, Maryland wrote about the recent lack of sign language interpreters at the 22nd International Education of the Deaf Congress held in Athens, Greece in July of 2015.
While there were over 650 presentations from scholars from around the world, they were not accessible to the 122 Deaf participants because 40% of the sessions did not have International Interpreters. The Deaf attendees drafted a resolution for future conferences to provide universal language access to participants in International Sign Language and English (printed, captioned and spoken) and included guidelines for the scheduling and budgeting of for qualified International interpreters as well as real-time captioning
World Federation of Sign Language Interpreters Facebook page can be found at:
https://www.facebook.com/wasli.official.
Also see: http://wfdeaf.org
Here’s the two organization’s statement on the Mandela Memorial.
Jean F. Andrews is a Reading Specialist and Professor Emerita of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education at Lamar University.