Instead of warring over whether their microphones will be muted while the other is speaking during the upcoming presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should be worried that they could essentially be muted for millions of Americans who don’t hear well during the live Sept. 10 broadcast.
While broadcasters are required by law to air most programs with closed captioning, the service is often delayed and rife with errors during live political events. And even though many deaf people are fluent in American Sign Language, people who are deaf or hard of hearing often struggle more with reading in English.
A group of 90 disability organizations urged CNN to hire live sign language interpreters for its June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, to no avail. They’re now asking host network ABC for the same.
(In 2016 and 2020, the nonprofit streaming service Deaf Professional Arts Network, or D-PAN, aired their own live webcast with interpreters. But Sean Forbes, the chief executive of D-PAN, told the 19th that they didn’t secure funding for the service this year.)
Disability advocates argue that the debate host should provide interpreters not only for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who sign, but for the hearing audience, too — to remind us that the electorate is composed of voters with varying degrees of ability. (A recent Rutgers University study found an uptick in voting among people with disabilities; 15.8 million U.S. citizens with disabilities voted in the 2022 midterm elections.)
But there’s another reason to do it: to make the debates better.
Last year, I caught a performance of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” at Soho Place in London that featured a deaf actor named Rose Ayling-Ellis as the charming and comical Celia, cousin of the lovesick Rosalind. Captions of the script appeared on screens around the theater in the round.
Not only did Ayling-Ellis’s facial expressions and the pacing of her signs enhance the physical comedy of the performance, but the captions made it easier and richer as a hearing person to follow the playful turns of Shakespeare’s words as other actors spoke them aloud. It was an even better experience than watching star-studded Shakespeare productions put on by the Public Theater in Central Park.
A debate between Harris and Trump, of course, won’t be like the poetry of the Bard: Words without thoughts never to heaven go. But debate staging, like a play, could still benefit from being more accessible. An interpreter or two, standing to the side or below the candidates, would add an extra layer to the performance, including to a subset of often-neglected viewers.
ASL interpreters increasingly translate live political events, including at Biden’s State of the Union address and at the Democratic National Convention, opening up access to a part of the electorate too often overlooked and signaling its importance.
Sign-language interpreters can’t prevent Trump from making a disparaging remark about disabled veterans or Harris from offering a vague jobs plan for people with disabilities on the debate stage, but their presence might create cognitive dissonance in viewers’ minds if they do. That alone would be a good thing — not just for the 1 in 4 American adults who have some type of disability but for all of us who live alongside them.
Most Americans have a relative or friend or co-worker with a disability, regardless of whether they’re aware of it. Yet most of our community spaces and workplaces don’t change our way of doing business. Instead, we accommodate some specific differences with accessories and devices, from on-ramps to signs in Braille, while keeping our dominant ways of doing things. While that deprives millions of people from participating fully in public life, it deprives all of us of the potential benefits — and even beauty — of adapting our world to the differing abilities of those around us.
Consider curb cuts, made mainstream around the country after President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990. In addition to making sidewalks more accessible for people in wheelchairs, curb cuts make it easier for all kinds of people to push strollers, ride skateboards, roll suitcases and step down off curbs into crosswalks. The curb-cut phenomenon has inspired other efforts to make accessibility not an afterthought but a part of the way buildings and cities are designed.
In a perfect world, American communities might do even more to meet the needs of people with different abilities. In the 18th and 19th centuries in Chilmark, Mass., a small town on Martha’s Vineyard, a widespread occurrence of hereditary deafness in the population once made it practical for most residents to become bilingual in the island’s own dialect of sign language and English.
Fishermen used sign language to communicate across distances at sea; young children who could hear and speak used it to communicate silently during class and prayer meetings. One former resident told anthropologist Nora Groce that knowing sign language in that community was something to be admired, like knowing how to speak French. Deaf and hearing people intermarried and worked alongside one another, and in many instances, the deaf people were better-educated and held more esteemed positions in the community. “This was a place where deafness was not considered a disability,” Ebba Hierta, the director of the Chilmark Free Public Library, recently told me.
We might not see a society like the one in Chilmark again, but having a small hint of utopia in our country’s past should point us to a greater sense of possibility for our future. We could tilt toward communities that adapt to a broader range of abilities and aptitudes — not just because it’s the moral thing to do but also because of what we might stand to gain.
For now, a modest start would be to stage our country’s most consequential debate in a way that reaches more Americans and reminds us of those who need the most care.
