Over the next few weeks, local deaf charity Gloucestershire Deaf Association will be releasing weekly videos which aim to help Gloucestershire become the ‘most deaf friendly county’ in Britain.

The videos are possible thanks to a grant awarded by the Lloyds TSB Foundation Trust in 2013 to fund a two-year project to help Deaf and hard of hearing people manage their finances more independently. So far GDA has delivered a series of deaf friendly workshops, using both sign language and spoken presentations, and each focussing on a different money topic from understanding mortgages and the new Personal Independence Payment (PIP) scheme, to knowing how to make a Will and how to find the best credit card available. The funding has also enabled the charity to offer deaf awareness training to businesses which are interested in improving accessibility to their services for people with hearing impairment.

Now GDA is ready to take its project to the next stage, which is help Gloucestershire become the ‘most deaf friendly county’ . To do this, it needs to reach more businesses with its deaf awareness message, and its new series of videos is just the tool to do so.

Each of the short videos uses a humorous storyline to highlight one or more specific problems that hamper deaf people every day in their effort to use mainstream services that hearing people take for granted, from visiting the bank to gaining access to a building using an intercom entry system. Most videos feature Reg Cobb, GDA’s Project Developer and a Deaf sign language user himself, who over the past two years has become a social media star through the charity’s weekly BSL newsletters.

Says Reg Cobb, “Our experience tells us that deaf people want to be independent; they want to be able to manage their own finances and they want to take control of their own lives. However so often the reality for them is that they cannot access services which are only available by telephone because they cannot hear; and if they are a Deaf sign language user, they find businesses do not realise what steps they can take to assist communication. All the issues around deafness are solvable and often at little or no cost; our aim is to make Gloucestershire businesses more aware what these are.”

One in 7 people in Gloucestershire experiences some level of hearing impairment, and in these competitive and challenging times it makes sense for Gloucestershire businesses to wake up to the spending power many deaf people have. GDA is calling on the local media, businesses and groups to get behind the call to become more deaf aware. The first video will be launched on Thursday 22nd January at 12pm and then every Thursday thereafter for five weeks.

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