We’ve mentioned briefly that among our current projects is a duo of games for the Deaf Culture Centre here in Toronto. The DCC is building a new website to showcase its facility, which houses creative works by Deaf Canadians. The Centre also honours the achievements of other Deaf folks, including teachers, authors, and athletes.

Working with the DCC has definitely been educational. Key to a successful relationship is etiquette, which i don’t always handle well in the hearing world. Here are a few cues to follow when interfacing with Deaf culture:

Considerate/Acceptable

• waving your hands in front of someone’s face to get his attention
• stomping your feet or banging on a table to get someone’s attention with vibrations
• walking between people who are having a signed conversation

Inconsiderate

• turning someone’s face with your hands to get his attention
• holding someone’s hands to keep him from speaking
• guessing at signs. You never know what you’ll accidentally say!

This is not to say i’ve learned all this stuff the hard way. i had a conversation with a friend who’s taught at a Deaf school for a number of years, and she clued me in to a few of these.

i’ve been to the Centre a few times for meetings, and they’ve hired an interpreter. i’ve been very careful to maintain eye contact with the signing person, instead of appearing to carry on a conversation with the interpreter, but etiquette is a different world with sign language. If the interpreter was translating an oral language, i think it would be entirely appropriate to face and lock on to the original speaker. But since sign language is so visual, and facial expression is so important to convey meaning, the speaker signs to the interpreter instead of to me. This is a little awkward, because i don’t quite know whether to face the speaker or the interpreter. i made an early decision to face the speaker, and it seems to work out alright.

Our Foray into Quadrilingual Game Development

The games we’re creating for the Centre are challenging, because they’re in four different languages: English, French, ASL (American Sign Language) and LSQ (Langue des signes québécoise). Both signed languages have to be filmed with actors in front of a green screen. Additionally, the videos have to have voice-overs for players who may be hard of hearing, but not completely Deaf. They also have to be captioned.

If that weren’t tricky enough, the Centre has requested that the games be playable by blind and low-vision players. Since one of the games is a custom skin of Jigsaw!, this wasn’t going to fly. But it is possible to accommodate blind and low-vision players in the larger game, a feat that we feel assured of pulling off. Years ago, i worked on a multiplayer Battleship-style game for blind and low-vision players with the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind).

The LSQ shoot last week was probably the most complicated set i’ve ever been on:

If i wanted to talk to the actor, i had to speak in English. The interpreter would translate my request into ASL and relay it to the acting coach, who would translate the ASL signs into LSQ, and sign them to the actor. The process had to be reversed if the actor needed to communicate with me. To simplify things, communication occasionally devolved into facial-signing pidgin, where through broad, clown-like mugging and angled eyebrows, we were able to get by.

Of course, the nice thing about doing a shoot at the Deaf Culture Centre is that you don’t have to worry about sound. While we filmed, the GO Transit train rattled by on the tracks outside the building, people scraped chairs and dropped things, and a newborn baby cooed and cried while its mom cuddled it. There were even two shoots happening simultaneously, with only a thin curtain separating the green screen space between groups. It was a nice change from having the “QUIET ON THE SET!” guy jumping down everyone’s throats, or killing the shot because he could hear a plane taking off two towns over.

i really quite enjoy the accessibility challenge of developing these games. i know we haven’t perfected the formula by any means, but we’ll be listening closely to player feedback this time around to bolster our expertise, in case projects like these come up again.

Untold Entertainment’s games for the Deaf Culture Centre will debut at their gala on May 10th.