This is a weekly roundup of national and international news articles about Deaf individuals and Deaf-related events and concepts. The aim is to give a slightly Deaf perspective on the journalism and story.

The St. Paul, Minnesota-based Star Tribune reports on a story about a Deaf couple who weren't able to receive information about a terminal illness. Their hospital could not or did not provide interpreters. The wife in the affair had two months left to live by the time they were able to get a written explanation from their doctor. Casual experience on the part of most Deaf people would seem to indicate this is a common problem. For every person or couple that speak out on this issue, there are a dozen who maintain silence out of fear of losing what services they do receive, or because there simply aren't equivalent services elsewhere in an area. The American ADA isn't vague at all about this provision: hospitals have a responsibility to provide interpreters. In case after case the government has chosen to uphold the provision of medical care with American Sign Language interpreters.

AM News reports that Senator Ray Jones II, a Democrat from Kentucky, has filed Senate Bill 102 which requires film theaters with five or more screens to offer closed captioned films. This is an issue felt by Deaf people as far away as Australia, with no clear answer; the rare open-captioned film seems at least marginally preferable to the clunkly rear-window-captioning device. Ironically, there is no clear law governing the accessibility of movie theaters, forcing Deaf Americans to fight this issue out in the courts.

On a similar note, Brian Szoka of the LA Times claimed that legislation such as HR 3101, which would require accessibility on the internet, would stifle technological progress. By having a law mandating such access, he claims, people would be forced to follow government programming and not be motivated to create new, cool forms of accessible technology. (In contradiction to this theory, although there is no clear law requiring accessibility in movie theaters, theater owners haven't magically invented new forms of access...) Deaf bloggers, as well as the National Association of the Deaf, blasted this writer.

And in Powhatan County, Virginia, the Department of Corrections has been sued in a rights violation on behalf of deaf prisoners. The suit states that Deaf prisoners receive unequal access to safety or prison programs both because an intepreter is provided only once a week for six hours, and because the jail is visually inaccessible. Other examples of similar complaints include the jail at Alameda County, which on February 2nd announced a settlement to provide sign language interpreters to a range of individuals at Santa Rita Jail and Glynn Dyer Jail.

Of note: in Jackson, Missisippi a 19-year-old high school senior has become the first deaf person to work as a page for the Mississippi Legislature.