White House Sued For Not Providing Sign Language Interpreter At COVID-19 Briefings – By Marina Fang (Huffpost) / Aug 4 2020
The failure violates the First Amendment and federal law for Americans with disabilities, the National Association of the Deaf says in its lawsuit.
An advocacy group for deaf Americans is suing the White House for failing to provide real-time sign language interpretation during COVID-19 news briefings, saying the omission violates the First Amendment and laws for Americans with disabilities.
The National Association of the Deaf says in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that President Donald Trump and his White House coronavirus task force briefings have not featured an American Sign Language interpreter visible on-screen, known as “televised in frame ASL interpretation,” since the briefings began in March.
By failing to provide an interpreter, the administration is blocking “access to critical, potentially life-saving information conveyed by our nation’s political and public health leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the lawsuit contends.
Closed captioning, required by federal law, is not a sufficient alternative because it is prone to error and can be hard to follow in real time, especially for people whose first language is not English, the suit says.
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