Our Deaf-friendly quiz goes online!

Last Thursday night we had brilliant fun at our first official virtual pub quiz and managed to raise some money for local charity DeafCOG at the same time.

Our awesome Quiz master Charlie hosted and the fantastic Kim from DeafCOG interpreted it into British Sign Language to ensure it was available to Deaf BSL users in their own language.

We launched our Deaf-friendly quiz in March just before the Covid-19 lockdown was announced as part of the World’s Biggest Pub Quiz – an annual event put on by national charity PubAid who provided the questions on the night.

A mixture of Deaf, hearing and hard-of-hearing people came along and we had an absolute blast. In order to make it as accessible as we could, the questions and answers were delivered by Charlie, projected in writing onto our big TV screen and interpreted by Kim for the BSL users.

Why a Deaf-friendly quiz?

The idea had initially come about because some of our regulars had trouble hearing the quiz before. To make it easier for them we had planned to simply project the questions and answers onto a TV screen in the pub. But after learning a bit more about different levels of hearing loss, from Hard-of-Hearing to being profoundly Deaf, we realised we could only truly call the quiz “Deaf-friendly” if it was available in the language which many Deaf people use – British Sign Language

Moving to a virtual Pub Quiz

After the pub was closed, we were not to be deterred from carrying on with our quizzes and decided to move them online. After a successful trial, we held the quiz on zoom and were delighted to have almost 40 people turn up!

Once again it was great fun – we all laughed a lot, gave our brain cells a work out, made new friends and the hearing people even learnt a few BSL signs along the way. We asked people to donate their usual entry fee (£1) to DeafCOG to help them carry on their work supporting Deaf people across Sussex and lots of teams decided to donate their points tally instead!

Next quiz nights

We are now planning to hold a Deaf-friendly quiz once a month and will have another quiz (not interpreted) in between. The questions and answers will still be visible on screen, we just won’t have BSL interpretation.

The next dates are:

Thursday 14^th May from 8pm on zoom
Thursday 28^th May from 8pm on zoom (Deaf-friendly)

DeafCOG and COVID-19

DeafCOG is a charity providing support to Deaf people throughout East Sussex providing an essential service which has become even more important due to the lack of official information in BSL since the Covid-19 crisis began. DeafCOG has worked with the local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups in Brighton & Hove, and East and West Sussex to develop a Video Relay Service which has gone live in all GP practices this month and offers telephone access and consultations to British Sign Language (BSL) users.

The service has been rolled out at speed in response to Covid-19 and the changes in how GP practices are offering healthcare during the pandemic.

BSL facts – Did you know?

As it’s Deaf Awareness Week we thought it might be interesting to learn a few facts about British Sign Language (BSL).

1. British Sign Language is one of over 200 official sign languages used around the world.

2. BSL isn’t simply English with hand signs, it is a different language with its own grammar and sentence construction.

3. British Sign Language (BSL) is the preferred language of over 87,000 Deaf people in the UK for whom English may be a second or third language

4. BSL has been in use for hundreds of years. The first printed account in the UK of its usage was recorded in 1644

5. Sign languages are not derived from the spoken language of a country. So, although in Great Britain, Ireland and the United States the main spoken language is English, all three have entirely separate sign languages.

6. BSL was recognised as an “official” language by the UK Government on 18th March 2003 but it does not yet have any legal status unlike Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish.

7. Giving BSL a legal status would mean that more information and services could be produced in BSL. It could also be added to the national curriculum, like other modern languages, giving children the chance to learn it at school and giving BSL users access to education in their first language.

Thanks to the British Deaf Association for many of these facts.