State Shares New Videos To Understand Civil Rights in Hawaii
A series of educational videos covering basic civil rights has been released by the State of Hawaii.
The Hawaii Civil Rights Commission (HCRC) and the Hawaii State Disability and Communication Access Board (DCAB) produced the video series in American Sign Language (ASL) to provide direct information to individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing and deafblind.
The series consists of five videos with the first four covering individual rights, communication access discrimination, employment discrimination, and housing discrimination. The fifth video shows the process of filing a complaint with the HCRC for discrimination cases.
“The HCRC is keenly aware of the importance of providing access to services for persons in the communities we serve,” said HCRC Executive Director Marcus Kawatachi. “We learned from DCAB and community advocates that English captioning does not provide equal access for some whose first language is ASL, and this realization led to the development of this project in partnership with DCAB.”
Moreover, the HCRC website offers the videos in multiple languages such as English, Ilocano, Tagalog, Chuukese, Marshallese, and Hawaiian. The expansion to ASL videos is intended to reach and empower more residents.
“The ADA requires public entities to take appropriate steps to ensure that communications with persons with disabilities are as effective as communications with people without disabilities,” said Kirby Shaw, DCAB Executive Director.
“The videos communicate important civil rights and enforcement information in a format that will be understood by many whose primary language is ASL. DCAB hopes this partnership will serve as a model for other agencies that want to provide information in ASL.”
