NAD Announces Support of "Silence No More Rally"

The National Association of the Deaf announced its support of the "Silence No More!" rally led by the Gallaudet University Student Body Government (SBG) to protest the lack of captioning in the United States. The rally will take place on Friday, April 16, 3:30 - 5:00 pm at the Upper Senate Park, located at the corner of Constitution and New Jersey Avenues, NE, Washington, DC. "This is a time for fellow deaf and hard of hearing Americans to gather and speak out on an issue dear to us, captioning as a form of communication access," said Andrew J. Lange, NAD president.

The rally will point to the absence of captioning in various areas such as emergency captioning, movie theatre captioning, airport visual captioning, in-flight movie captioning, train and transit captioning, television programming captioning, and more.

"It has been 14 years since the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed and we have yet to see widespread adoption of captioning as the standard accessibility package provided by our nation's facilities" said Kelby Brick, Director of the NAD Law and Advocacy Center.

The mission of the NAD is to promote, protect, and preserve the rights and quality of life of deaf and hard of hearing individuals in the United States of America. By joining with the students at Gallaudet and others, the NAD stands firm in its commitment to ensure full communication access to all deaf and hard of hearing Americans.

More information about the rally can be found at http://sbg.gallaudet.edu/news.htm [2]