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 14th May from 8pm on zoom
- Thursday 28th May from 8pm on zoom (Deaf-friendly)
Register for our next quiz at www.thebevy.co.uk/quiz