Making Your Events Accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing

Many nonprofits have been implementing their commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB). One important part of inclusiveness is disability inclusion. You want to ensure that your events of all kinds are accessible to people of all abilities, whether they are a speaker or an attendee of your event. Options such as American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting, live transcripts and closed captioning are more available than ever, even to organizations on a tight budget. 

Amy Silver O'Leary published an article on the website of Council of Nonprofits on March 16, 2022 to explain that ASL is the first language for the people who grow up in deaf community so that providing captioning is like enforcing them to translate scripts into their first language - ASL. The article also introduces the best way to know your speakers and audience's need is to ask them. It also provides tips of finding interpreters and budgeting. For captioning, the article tells how captioning works for events; and if you ever record your events, how to use free YouTube tools and then professional captioning services to improve accuracy to get subtitled videos.

​To read the original, full report, please visit here.

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At RABI, we provide a full line of services to deaf and hard-of-hearing speakers and attendees at events, including but not limited to:

• ASL Interpreting: English and ASL (both ways)
• Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART)/Live Captioning 
• Video Captioning in 100+ Languages
• Post Production of Videos
• On-site Interpreters Coordinator at Event Venue 

Service Format: 

• In-person: Local interpreters nationwide
• Virtual