Full Inclusion with Sign Language

This year’s Deaf Awareness Week’s theme is “Full Inclusion with Sign Language.” Mohamad Sazali Shaari, president of Malaysia Federation of the Deaf (MFD), speaks to us about the accessibility of sign languages, and a recently completed book on the Malaysian Sign Language, which he and his colleagues from MFD spent the past two years putting together. Sazali is deaf, so Sign Language Interpreters Wan Zuraidah Abu and Goh Soo Leng, both also from MFD, help us translate. Sazali, Zuraidah and Goh also discuss the lack of sign language interpreters in the country, why university enrollment among deaf people remain low, and how simple pleasures hearing-able people take for granted - like watching movies or listening to a song - are inaccessible to deaf people.