This week, Sheffield City Council joined SignLive’s Community Directory, which means deaf people can access a BSL interpreter for council services for free.
They will now be able to call directly to Sheffield Council without having to wait for an interpreter to be booked two weeks in advance.
Steph Lotz, the Director of Customer Success for SignLive, said: “If I need to get some communication access I can pull an interpreter out of my pocket. So it does really become life-saving.”
SignLive is a video relay service (VRS) which was founded 10 years ago by Joel Kellhofer, a deaf person who was thinking about the barriers that deaf people face.
Interpreters are available 24 hours a day on the app, so a deaf person can see the interpreter by video call while being on call to another person or bring them into an in person conversation.
Mrs Lotz said: “Earlier I had a couple of deaf people who came and visited and said, oh I can talk directly as myself, I’ve got my own independence.
“And that is really powerful for a deaf person to have their own independence, to make their own decisions about how they communicate or contact another person without relying on someone else to do it for them.
“Within our community and our culture, it’s always been ingrained that we have to rely on someone else to give us access, but actually now we don’t need to. We can do it independently.”
SignLive has over 140 highly qualified interpreters with at least 5 years experience on their platform, and can help to call family, make appointments, or in meetings.
The interpreters can also translate bodies of text such as documents and emails.
Mrs Lotz said: “Usually as deaf people who are employed, we would have something called access to work funding from the government which allows us to do our day to day job and fund it, then some get direct payments from the council to maintain their independence at home.
“But the community directory is provided from the organisation themselves giving access to the deaf community, so it comes at no cost to the deaf person.”
Under the new scheme, deaf people will have immediate access to the council, not only remotely, but on demand. For example, if they go into the branch and there’s no interpreter, they can use a laptop to connect with SignLive and speak to a staff member in the building.