How lucky for deaf people that cannot hear the media outpouring its diatribe and lies.

Dan

It is mere virtue signalling. How many deaf people attend press conferences? These idiots, furiously gesticulating and pulling faces at people who are not there are seriously annoying.

It's bordering on the comical. I like to see a game of Chinese whispers among a dozen sign language practitioners. A starting message like 'the cat sat on the mat' could end up as 'free East Timor' or whatever. Ironically the ABC and SBS are now doing voice over commentary for the vision impaired. How about optional large captions for both hearing and vision impaired?

Those TV channels also thank the indigenous former inhabitants. As far as I know the latter didn't have electronic communications. In Tasmania you no longer have to put a baby's gender on the birth certificate. Australia apparently has 1200 or so people born with an ambiguous gender, another 25m don't. We must be approaching virtue signalling fatigue.

I have sympathy for death people. I'm not stone deaf, but I have to wear hearing aids and use captions on the TV. I can't understand what most young people, particularly high-pitched females, say. This is partly due to their appalling diction and mispronunciation. So, anything to help deaf people is OK by me. But having these 'performers' in front of a crowd where deaf people are highly unlikely to be is expensive nonsense. I wonder if actual deaf people were consulted before some ignorant do-gooder decided all this grimacing and arm flinging was a good idea because it might get them on the Queen's Birthday Honours List.

I'm also consering tracking down and gutting the genius employed by my audiology firm who thinks it's a good idea to have someone with a thick Asian accent call deaf people by telephone.

A simpler solution is to use court reporters and their machines and place a sliding digital display on the speaker's lectern.
Could there possibly be a simpler solution.
The court reporter could be out of sight anywhere, and the display
connected to the reporter by a wire or the internet or locally by wifi.

I find the use of signing on TV offensive. It is merely another form of useless virtue signaling.

I am not deaf, but liker a remarkably high proportion of the aged population, for the last some years tinnitus has made it hard to understand some, particularly womens, voices & impossible to separate a voice from intrusive background music or sound effects. It is only since I developed tinnitus that I have learned how many older folk develop the problem.

I find it amazing how many so called professional TV producers do not know they are limiting their audience with excessive use of such background noise/music. Too many documentaries that I would like to watch are simply not worth the effort of trying to decipher the spoken word from the background noise.

It is highly unlikely that those afflicted with tinnitus later in life are going to learn signing, so it is really an insult to us to have some clown mucking around beside a speaker, when text to help all would be more appropriate.