In my years as a software engineer at the FT, the organisation has taken an increasingly proactive approach to improving its diversity and inclusivity, setting itself aspirational goals to advance the culture and broaden its representation of talent.
As a hearing person, I was naively oblivious to all the invisible work that my Deaf software engineer colleagues do in addition to their terms of contract.
What follows is based on my personal learning experiences and it is worth stating that I am by no means an authority on these complex subjects and if I have made any mistakes then I will always try to grow from them.
The challenge presented by the small/absent intersection of a shared language between Deaf and hearing teammates makes BSL (British Sign Language) interpreters integral facilitators of workplace communication. Arranging their attendance entails a substantial amount of work for the Deaf engineer, including:
- applying for and budgeting of Access to Work governmental grant
- coordination of schedules
- provisioning of interpreters’ access to necessary tools and services
- onboarding and training of interpreters in organisation-specific jargon
- timely sign-off and processing of invoices to ensure interpreters are paid
It is not unusual to employ multiple interpreters, which increases this workload further. It is also vital to find interpreters who are equipped with the appropriate technical vocabulary and can serve the specific accessibility needs of the individual (e.g. one of the FT’s engineers is Deafblind).
With all that done, the day’s work can finally begin…! The notion of this communicative labour required to collaborate effectively with your colleagues is inherently unfair and the FT readily acknowledges that the necessity of this work means it must fall within contracted hours. It has also made arrangements to pay interpreters directly (and is reimbursed from the grant subsequently), abating that particular burden.
However, the grant is not sufficient to cover a full working week of interpreter costs, resulting in a portion of the time without this key service. This issue is by no means unique to the FT, though diversity without inclusion is superficial and unsustainable, and we cannot consider ourselves inclusive while not making any personal effort of adapting to support our colleagues’ needs.
Within the Product & Technology department, it felt like we had the right attitude to try and improve this situation, if only in a small way. There was certainly the appetite to learn: a couple of our Deaf colleagues generously hosted BSL sessions and created video references of tech-specific signs, which enabled some basic workplace conversations and stimulated people’s interest to take it further. However, in this scenario the burden of work still remained unfairly on them.
After popular demand from those wanting to learn, the FT’s Learning & Development team arranged a formal course which ended with the class of roughly a dozen taking the BSL 101 examination.
From the course and exam, attendees achieved a level of competence and confidence in their BSL that they felt would be worth sharing further within the department. A group was formed to run informal sessions designed to raise awareness of Deaf culture and conduct participatory learning of the BSL alphabet and some basic signs, with the intention of bridging the inclusivity gap at the FT. (It was made clear that the sessions were not run by qualified teachers but rather people simply wanting to pass on what they had learned.)
The sessions covered a wide range of topics:
BSL alphabet
Knowing how to fingerspell your ABCs and sign ‘sign what?’ allows you to ask for the sign of anything and so build your vocabulary through conversation, e.g. ‘A-P-P-L-E sign what?’
Syntax
BSL’s syntax dif
