All of our ASL Groups Are On Hold Due to Washington State Mandates about COVID

by Hawke Robinson — last modified Aug 25, 2021 05:54 AM

Once again we need to put our ASL groups on hold. Everyone agrees the online experience is far lacking, especially compared to the in-person experience, so we are putting the groups on hold for now. For many of our participants our ASL groups were their own in-person human social connection.

If you know a good location in Post Falls, Idaho (closest to Spokane), that would work for our ASL groups, please email spokaneasl at gmail dot com and we will check it out! This would allow us to resume our groups.

We have many ASL members that do not have sufficient broadband, webcams, microphones, headphones, or decent location from which they can participate online. A _lot_ of the ASL community includes people with low incomes and other challenges.

While, on our end we have higher-end equipment, broadband, and dedicated broadcast studios, too few other Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and ASL study participants have a sufficiently usable video conferencing setup for everyone to be able to follow their signing.

This has been too frustrating for the other participants so we have also discontinued our online sessions as well.

Our in-person sessions are on hold because of the Washington state mandates. Many of our ASL participants cannot take the vaccine and/or cannot wear face coverings due to other issues (we have a lot of ASL participants with complex health issues).

So, this means both our in-person and online programs will have to remain on hold until we either move everything to Idaho, or the Washington state mandates are lifted.

The groups on hold are:

ASL Study group for beginners
ASL Study Group for intermediate
ASL community "Deaf Coffee Chat"
ASL Role-playing Gaming groups 1 and 2 (ASL RPG)

We will update the website here when any of these groups resume either online or in-person once again.

Stay tuned.