The University of California, San Diego’s (UCSD) Moores Cancer Center has created of a set of nine streaming DVDs all in ASL (captioned and with voiceover). Six of the DVDs outline various forms of cancer and cancer prevention and three focus on how to live a healthy lifestyle. These DVDs provide a plethora of valuable medical information, and are also posted online. If you want to order the DVDs instead of viewing online, they are available for about $5 each here (volume discounts available).
The six cancer-oriented videos cover nine cancer topics: Breast Cancer, Prostate and Testicular Cancer, Gynecological Cancer (Cervical, Ovarian and Uterine Cancers), Colorectal Cancer, Skin Cancer, and Smoking Cessation. One nutrition video is on the importance of eating healthy, and another covers how to prepare healthy food. The final video is on exercise.
“This is fantastic information about cancer and health topics made accessible to the deaf,” said John Fisher Weber, vice president and COO of Deaf Interpreter Services. “It can not only be used to educate individual deaf people directly, but organizations such as ours also plan to use it to educate our staff so that we can offer better service to our clients.”
The videos have won multiple awards, including the MarCom Awards, the Ava Awards, the Telly Awards, the Communicator Awards and the Videographer Awards.
The videos join a growing number of other health care resources available online for the deaf. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has captioned all its videos, which offer information about asthma, HIV/AIDS, childhood immunizations, concussions, flu, carbon monoxide poisoning and more. Disabled World hosts a handful of videos in ASL on the basics of sign language and the rights of people disabled with hearing loss. While the University of Rochester Medical Center has put together a page full of health care resources for the deaf, and has information on topics, including health care and deaf health research, medical interpreting, and medical student education for the deaf and research culture. The Braille Institute has a library of videos and a YouTube channel.