Question: Watching various COVID-related briefings, I notice there is always a sign language interpreter. This is clearly necessary, yet thinking about all the conferences I've attended in the past, literally none of them have had a sign language interpreter.

How do conferences work for deaf scientists? Do deaf scientists simply not attend conferences? If so, how does one even work in fields such as computer science where conferences are an integral part of the academic experience?

Answer: 
In most disciplines and in the larger more developed countries it's perfectly straightforward to provide real-time transcription where the speech is transcribed into text on a big screen (or streamed to a delegate's laptop or tablet).

> 
> Many deaf and hearing-impaired people do not have sign language, or
> fluent sign language, and as with translation between any two
> languages, nuance can be lost and ambiguities can be introduced in the
> translation from English to Sign. Sign interpretation also requires
> that a student maintain continuous eye contact, usually necessitating
> additional notetakers. Students using real-time transcription can take
> their own notes; the last dozen or so lines of the lecture are
> displayed on the transcription screen for easy reference.
> 
> 
> 

(adapted from [Mirabai Knight Stenography](http://stenoknight.com/FAQ.html#cartname))

Using computer-assisted realtime transcription (CART) is useful not just for people with hearing impairment; people whose first language is not the same as the speaker's, or people with some specific learning difficulties, may find it useful to have a real-time transcript.

> 
> **In the USA, one in seven people have hearing loss. For people over 65,
> that rate goes up to one in three.** Events at most conferences seat
> hundreds of people, so statistically it’s a sure bet that at least
> some of those people would benefit from captioning. Even people with
> mild hearing loss, who do quite well in one-on-one social situations
> by using a combination of residual hearing, lip reading, and context
> clues, often have trouble with conference audio, which can be
> distorted in the amplification process, and which puts the speaker so
> far away from the audience that lipreading becomes impossible. There’s
> also the benefits that captioning can offer people without hearing
> loss, who may be more comfortable reading written English than
> understanding spoken English (very common when English isn’t a
> person’s first language), or who may have central audio processing
> issues (very common in Aspergers and autism) or attention deficit
> issues such as ADHD.
> 
> 
> 

<https://ccacblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/conference-captioning-ask-for-it/>

And the transcript forms a useful record of the conference, and can be used by people who couldn't attend the conference because of cost or distance, or who have disabilities making travel impossible or difficult, or who are unable to obtain visas. The transcript can also be translated (or machine-translated, which may be good enough for getting the gist or deciding whether ot order a paid-for translation).

All this widens access to and participation in the conference, and means that the cost of providing the transcript can be covered by the general budget rather than being a specific cost for one or two delegates.

An example of a conference video being transcribed

<https://livestream.com/accounts/686369/events/4375102/videos/100329035>

And a picture of a conference with, it appears, both transcription and sign.

[![delegates on a conference stage, with a presentation video screen and a transcription video screen behind them; the transcription screen is showing the words spoken by a delegate ](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t5mYg.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t5mYg.jpg)
COVID briefings are aimed at the general public (and many Deaf people have poor English skills due to a history of bad Deaf education) and are low on jargon (hence fairly straightforward to interpret). Interpreting into the local sign language is the right choice for maximum accessibility.

For a high-jargon scientific speech to an audience of scientists, transcription may be the better option. You would need a specialist interpreter to manage such a speech; and it would be tricky for the Deaf audience member to view both the interpreter and the slides at the same time.