Delivering in British Sign Language: Advice for Public Services

This page contains advice for using interpreters and technology to deliver services in BSL.

Social inclusion and equal access to services provision for British Sign Language (BSL) users are enormously important equality and human rights issues. Those who use BSL as their language for everyday participation in our society are often overlooked because their numbers are relatively small. This increases the already compound exclusion faced by the people who are part of this linguistic minority.

Citizens who use BSL still experience unacceptable delays in securing appointments, or are asked to bring a friend to interpret, cope by lipreading, or use pen and paper to communicate in a second language, in which they may have limited literacy. Each of these scenarios leads to a poorer quality of service and information, and has the effect of disempowering the service user.