From the San Francisco Chronicle: “Clark Brooke signed the word “fast” in American Sign Language while shaping his lips to indicate “very fast.”
Then he put on a cloth face mask and made the same sign.
“Now you’re losing that facial expression, the mouth emphasis,” he said in ASL through an interpreter. “The face provides the tones and emphasis for ASL. You cannot remove it and just sign.”
With health orders increasingly tightening the rules around wearing face masks in public, deaf and hard of hearing people confront a new accessibility challenge — how to communicate when part of the needed information is gone….