NAD ranks states on ASL accessibility during pandemic
On Wednesday the NAD’s Policy Institute released a report that ranked all 50 U.S. states, from 1st to 50th, for how their state governors’ offices handled the provision of sign language interpreters during pandemic-related press briefings from March 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020.
The NAD said the most accessible state is Arkansas, followed by Nevada, Maryland and Virginia in a tie for third place, and Massachusetts.
The worst state for accessibility was Florida at 50th place, followed by Montana at 49th and New York at 48th.
The NAD also gave each state 0 to 3 “ILY” symbols to measure their frequency of using deaf interpreters. If deaf interpreters were used between 90% to 100% of the time, a state would receive three ILY symbols. Thirteen states received three ILY symbols: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Maine, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Minnesota, and New York.
The use of deaf interpreters didn’t have an impact on the NAD’s state rankings. The NAD said, “… not every state has deaf interpreters available pursuant to their requirements… the ranking was designed to focus on the provision of qualified interpreters rather than penalizing for not using deaf interpreters.”
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The NAD said their assessment measured the percentage of how many of each governor’s briefings had ASL interpreters present and measured the visibility of the ASL interpreters during the broadcasts.
The NAD said a limitation to their study was that they didn’t measure “what was broadcast by television stations, given that these networks did not always display the interpreters during that broadcast.”
The NAD provided a special recognition to North Dakota for being innovative by “being the only state to provide an interpreter in person when not using a visual aid and through PIP when visual aids were used.” Michigan was also recognized for using an out-of-state deaf interpreter to summarize the governor’s statements due to a lack of qualified in-state deaf interpreters.
The NAD said “as a best practice, governors’ offices need to always provide an interpreter for their emergency briefings and optimize their visibility… Such ideal conditions need to be planned in advance…”
The NAD gave credit for this study to Zainab Alkebsi, Howard A. Rosenblum, and Dr. Kari Hansen.
You can check out the state rankings at the link in the description or the transcript.
https://www.nad.org/ranking-report-of-states-for-asl-access-during-covid-19-briefings/