In France, more than 7 million people experience hearing problems, or 11% of the population. And this is a figure that is not likely to fall with the aging of the population. In addition to people who are hard of hearing, around 180,000 people define themselves as deaf, about half of whom practice French Sign Language (LSF). It is therefore very important to make the videos accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. SOLEIL engages in this process with the production of videos with subtitles and dubbed in LSF.
Deafness, wether it is progressive or since birth, creates a communication problem between individuals. More than 11% of French people actually declare they find it difficult to follow an oral conversation between several people. Besides, you don't necessarily have to be deeply deaf to find yourself troubled: a mild hearing loss (between 20 and 40 decibels) can be enough to create difficulties in a noisy environment, such as a restaurant for example.
It is therefore not an isolated phenomenon, but on the contrary an important communication obstacle, which can have significant repercussions on access to culture, social and family integration, as well as on psychological condition of people (isolation, depression, cognitive decline for the elderly…).
This is why it is important to detect progressive deafness as soon as possible, to promote access to learning the French Sign Language, to raise awareness among hearing citizens about hearing loss, and finally, to offer a satisfactory cultural offer adapted to different audiences.
In this context, SOLEIL, which has been open for a long time to visits in French and in English, has undertaken to train a scientific mediator in LSF in order to allow the Deaf community to benefit from visits in their language. Since 2017, this person has therefore regularly followed intensive training courses to obtain level B2. We hope to set up the first visits to LSF during the course of this year.
In the meantime, we have decided to make our future videos accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing public, by having them subtitled in French or dubbed in LSF.
We are proud to present our first video, subtitled and dubbed. It explains how SOLEIL works, and is only the first in a series of 3, which will be published in the coming months.