Dearth of ASL interpreters in the public sector puts deaf individuals at a disadvantage
When Joshua Finkle goes to the hospital, he sometimes has to wait seven or eight hours before being seen. He is deaf, and that’s how long it can take for an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter to show up. The New York Department of Health requires hospitals to provide an interpreter within 20 minutes of a request.
Finkle is one of the over 200,000 New Yorkers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Although the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that all public facilities provide language interpreters or other services for hard of hearing individuals, there remains a shortage of certified sign language translators. The shortage is most notable in the public sector. And the problem seems to be only getting worse. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the demand for ASL interpreters will rise 46% from 2012 to 2022.
“In many situations, there’s an emergency or a fire, and they don’t have anything in place 24 hours a day, seven days a week to serve the deaf community in New York City,” said Finkle, who is the co-founder of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Interpreter Services, the only Deaf-owned interpreting agency in New York City.
The shortage of interpreters runs across industries. In 2018, only seven of the over 300 staff interpreters in New York courts worked in ASL, and they all worked in NYC courthouses and offices. This caused late hearings and postponed arraignments for deaf individuals. Two lawsuits were filed against the NYPD in 2011 and 2015 for failing to provide deaf people in custody with interpreters. Both cases were settled. As a result of the shortage of interpreters at city hospitals, patients like Andre Berry have died. Berry died alone at home in 2013 because two city-run hospitals didn’t have sign-language translators available to explain to him the severity of his kidney disease.
Over the past few years, government agencies have employed new technologies in an attempt to fill the void of interpreters. In 2018, the de Blasio Administration rolled out ASL Direct, a video technology that helps Deaf individuals obtain city services “faster and more efficiently” by connecting them to an ASL interpreter via webcam. Several hospitals, like Mount Sinai and New York Presbyterian, use Video Remote Interpreters that also connect deaf patients to ASL translators online. In January, the NYPD approved a pilot sign language app, meant to help police officers communicate with the deaf. However, Christina Curry, the Executive Director of the Harlem Independent Living Center, says the measures in place haven’t proven helpful enough for deaf individuals. Live interpreters are critical.
“This is a huge problem for the deaf community,” said Curry, who is also deaf. The shortage of interpreters affects “just about any and every aspect that a deaf person needs to interact with a hearing person. There are not enough qualified/certified ASL interpreters to meet the needs of the Deaf community.”
