Deafax

One woman collapsed during labour and lost three pints of blood. Nothing was explained to her while it happened. She later said she was terrified. She was Deaf. She was also one of many. Deafax's research, carried out across England with Deaf mothers and midwifery staff, found that every Deaf woman interviewed felt they received a lesser standard of care than hearing patients. Not one exception. 83% of those mothers used BSL as their main language, and 95% said their deafness had affected their literacy. Put those two together and the problem is clear: the NHS communicates through speech in the appointment and English on the page, and for these women both routes fall short. A leaflet about postnatal depression or healthy eating was never going to reach them. The information exists. It just never arrives in a form they can use. The support meant to bridge that gap often was not there either. Of all the trusts that took part, only one had a midwife who could sign at a competent level, and she had funded her own training. Antenatal classes told the same story. Only two of the Deaf mothers interviewed attempted them at all. One gave up after the first session because no interpreter had been arranged. The rest did not try, already knowing what they would find. This is the gap Deafax has spent forty years working to close: training healthcare teams, building maternity resources visually and in BSL first, and developing practical tools so the next Deaf mother arriving on a labour ward is not starting from nothing. All of this sits inside a legal framework that gives Deaf patients the right to the same standard of information, treatment, and care as hearing patients. Deafax's research shows how far the day-to-day reality still falls short of that entitlement. That distance between the right and the reality is where the work continues. #DeafAwareness #BSL #MaternityAccess #Deafax #Healthcare

Forty years ago, a Deaf child in Spain was copying notes from a blackboard without understanding a word of what he was writing. The same child grew up to design the resources that made sure other Deaf children never had to do the same. Andrew Mootoo spent years at Deafax building visual-first learning materials at a time when nobody else was doing it. The 70% visual, 30% English approach he developed on Fax Buddies wasn't a theory. It came from knowing exactly what it felt like when the tools in front of you weren't made for you. He connected 150 Deaf children through fax machines. He videoconferenced with Deaf kids in New Zealand before Wi-Fi existed. Children there knew him by his sign name, the cow sign, a play on Mootoo, before they'd ever been in the same room as him. He's still designing. Still pushing. And still watching what gets built next. This is his story, and it's one of ours. Read the full Community Voices article below! #DeafAwareness #BSL #DeafCommunity #CommunityVoices #Deafax

"Blindness cuts you off from things. Deafness cuts you off from people." There is a kind of isolation that is easy to miss. It does not arrive in one moment. It accumulates. In every room where information was shared in the wrong language. Every appointment where nodding along was easier than asking again. Every conversation about health, rights, safety, that simply never took place. It is the Deaf young person in a sex education class while the teacher talks to a room that was never designed for them. The patient who walks out of a hospital appointment understanding less than half of what was said. The teenager stepping into adulthood with no accessible guide to what any of it means. When those gaps are never filled, they leave a mark. Deaf people are twice as likely to experience mental health problems. That figure does not exist in a vacuum. Behind it is a lifetime of missed appointments, half-understood diagnoses, and rooms full of people making decisions in a language that was never accessible to them. Tomorrow is Helen Keller Deaf-Blind Awareness Day. Her words have stayed with us this week, because the isolation she described is not history. It is what Deafax has spent 40 years showing up to address. Through Life Control, Deaf young people get real guidance on the things that matter when adulthood arrives. Through Access All Health, clinicians learn what it actually means to communicate with a Deaf patient. Through Visual Hospital, someone walking into a hospital appointment has a BSL-first guide so they leave knowing what happened and why. This is us refusing to let those gaps go unfilled. #DeafblindAwarenessWeek #DeafAwareness #MentalHealth #Inclusion #HelenKeller

For the second year running, Nationwide Building Society, Signing banks UK, deafPLUS & Deafax are finalists in the Global Good Awards for our collective work to improve outcomes for deaf people accessing financial services. Last year we were awarded “One to watch”, let’s see if our sustained impact and growth has impressed the judges to secure the top spot this year 🤞. My thanks go to the wonderful band of merry men and women who work together to do this: Breda Leyne Dr Tim Pascoe Alex Sloan Reg Cobb Mohamed Nisar Moledina Helen Lansdown Craig Crowley CBE FRSA (DLY) Leigh Smyth FRSA Ellie Crouch Rachel Vann SBUK Chair Anna Roughley (and recent Chair James West) #GlobalGoodFinanace #GlobalGood #GlobalGoodFinanceAwards #GlobalGoodAwards

In 1997, an eight-year-old Deaf girl called Donna sent seven faxes to her adult buddy. He sent two back. So she wrote to him and asked why. That letter had a greeting, a subject, the evidence, and a question. Nobody told her to write it. She wrote it because she had something to say and someone on the other end who was supposed to read it. For most Deaf children, that someone had never existed before. For the first time, 150 Deaf children across eight schools had a real correspondent. Someone waiting to hear from them. And when they wrote, the writing changed. The full story is in the article below. How it started, what it produced, and the thread that runs from a strobe light on a fax machine in Hertfordshire to the accessibility features on every smartphone today. Read it, or watch it in BSL. Link in the comments. #Deafax #DeafAwareness #Inclusion #BSL #DeafEducation

An eight-year-old girl had sent seven faxes to her Buddy. He had sent two back. So she picked up a pen and asked, why only two. That kind of confidence does not come from nowhere. It comes from giving a child a real audience, someone who reads what they write and writes back. For Deaf children in 1997, that was rarer than it should have been. More than 90% of Deaf children grow up in hearing families. Many move through a hearing school system where communication on their own terms is limited. Writing had a purpose in theory but in practice, for many Deaf children, there was no one waiting on the other end. Noreply. Just words going nowhere. Fax Buddies was built to change that. Launched in 1997 in partnership with BT and the National Council for Educational Technology, the programme matched Deaf children across eight schools with real adult volunteers. Each child wrote to their buddy once a week by fax and their buddy wrote back. For many of these children it was the first time a real person had written back to them directly. Not a teacher. Not a parent. Someone who was there just for them. Over twelve weeks, the evidence built quietly. 515 faxes sent by the children. 417 repliesreceived. Teachers began noticing things they had not seen before: longer letters, better spelling, growing confidence and greater independence. Children who had something to say, and for the first time, someone to say it to. The programme attracted attention beyond the classroom. Even when the Secretary of State for Education heard about it, he did not just send a letter of support. He signed up as a Fax Buddy himself. Next week we are going deeper into this story. The full history, the voices of the children involved and what Fax Buddies unlocked for Deafax's work in the decades that followed. Follow Deafax so you do not miss it. #DeafAwareness #DeafEducation #DeafChildren #Inclusion #Accessibility

What Happens When Sexual Health Education Is Not in Your Language The first time our team walked into a school to deliver sexual health education to a group of Deaf young people, they were not prepared for what they would hear. Young people were disclosing rape without knowing that is what it was. They could not name their own body parts. The concept of consent had never been explained to them. Some believed that socks and crisp packets were viable alternatives to contraception, because nobody had ever taught them otherwise. This was not carelessness. It was a system that consistently left Deaf young people out of one of the most important conversations we have with young people. "People were disclosing rape, but they didn't know that was what it was." That visit led to three years of national research across England and Scotland. What we found was not an isolated case. It was a pattern. 35% of Deaf people received no sex education at school. Of those who did, 65% described the information as inaccessible. Not because they were not engaged, but because the lesson had been handed to a teacher with no BSL and no materials that worked visually. Sex education assumes literacy. For many Deaf young people whose first language is British Sign Language, that assumption alone is enough to shut the door. A joint report with BPAS found that fewer than half of Deaf young people knew the age of consent, and more than half believed it was acceptable for a partner to say: "If you don't have sex with me, it means you don't love me." "We are always looking to unlock the way forward for Deaf people," says Helen. "Where there are barriers, we look for ways around them." At Deafax, our approach has always been built around access, not just awareness. Within our sexual health programme, we go into schools with first-language BSL trainers. We develop visually led, culturally sensitive materials so families from all backgrounds feel comfortable allowing their children to participate. Sessions cover consent, contraception, healthy relationships, online safety and the right to say no. When we leave, the work does not stop. We upskill professionals and return when needed. Online delivery means schools nationwide can access the same quality of support. We do this because a partial conversation is not a conversation at all. Over 40 years we have worked with schools, teachers, parents, healthcare providers and the probation service. The goal has never changed. Every Deaf young person should leave school with the language and knowledge to keep themselves safe, recognise when something is wrong, and understand their rights. We are still the only UK organisation delivering this work in BSL, in schools, with Deaf educators. We hope others join us in closing that gap. Forty years in, and we are just getting started on here. Follow along and join the conversation. #DeafEducation #SexualHealthEducation #BSL #DeafCommunity #Accessibility

There's still a lot of work to be done before everyone's right to understand and be understood is upheld - particularly in healthcare. But here are 4 UK organisations moving in the right direction: 1. HSBC - the first UK bank to offer BSL beginner training to all 23,000 employees, announced in April. The training was developed with RNID and delivered through Signature, the BSL qualification body. It builds on a 2024 Understanding Hearing Loss e-learning course and an existing BSL Video Relay Service for customers - a sequence of investments. Just this week, a Deaf Equity in Financial Services report was published that found only 18% of UK financial services offer fraud information in BSL, with 42% of organisations themselves recognising deaf customers can't resolve issues as quickly as hearing ones. HSBC's move stands out in a sector still failing the 18 million UK adults who are deaf or have hearing loss. 2. Liverpool Football Club & Carlsberg Group - Signs of Unity, launched at Anfield in February 2026. 8 pitchside interpreters signed You'll Never Walk Alone before the West Ham match, while fans across the stadium learned to sign along. The campaign was developed with the British Deaf Association and a Football Fan Council made up of Deaf supporters, BSL linguists, and sign-song specialists. BSL interpreters for fans are now at every men's and women's home fixture, with BSL training rolled out to bar staff at Anfield and at 16 Greene King Sport pubs across Merseyside - extending inclusion beyond the final whistle. 3. Arriva Rail London - 350 London Overground frontline staff trained in deaf awareness. The programme was co-developed with Deafax, Signly, and UCL's Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre, and is delivered by deaf trainers. It was developed with deaf passengers and the station teams who support them, and is embedded into customer service induction rather than offered as supplementary training. 4. Contact Scotland BSL - Scotland has run a national, 24-hour, government-funded BSL video relay service since 2014. A free service that lets Deaf BSL users contact any Scottish public service, including NHS Scotland, with a live BSL interpreter at any time of day. The Locked Out report names it as a transformative initiative and recommends England & Wales establish equivalents. The 24/7 BSL Health Access service that ran across the UK during the pandemic closed in 2021 when NHS funding ended. Across these examples we see Deaf-led organisations leading the design, with Deaf community input at every stage; mainstream organisations putting real budget and scale behind them; and accessibility as infrastructure embedded within standard operation - not a play for press attention. If you work in healthcare, you've now got 4 examples to point to. Let's make the NHS the next one. #DeafAwarenessWeek UCL RNID Signly Deafax British Deaf Association

For 40 years, we've been proving what's possible. Since 1985, Deafax has transformed how Deaf people access education, healthcare, and opportunity. From pioneering teleprinters that connected Deaf students to higher education, to developing the award-winning Signly App now used by museums and rail networks across the UK. We've never stopped innovating. The numbers tell part of the story: 1,000+ children, 600 teachers, and 300 adults reached across 10 countries. Revolutionary apps supporting over 4,000 people. Award-winning projects spanning sexual health education to rail accessibility, backed by partnerships with BBC, Microsoft, NHS, and University of Reading. But the real story? It's in the lives we've changed and the possibilities we've unlocked. We'll share stories from the people whose lives we've touched, what four decades have taught us about making the world more accessible, and updates on the work we're doing right now in healthcare and education. Whether you're seeking training for your organisation, exploring partnerships, or simply believe that accessibility should be the standard and not the exception, this is where our journey continues. 40 years in. Just getting started. #DeafAwareness #BSL #Inclusion #SocialImpact #Accessibility