The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) is thrilled to announce that its website has information in Spanish! Go to www.nad.org, and you will see an orange tab “En Español” at the top right. The NAD recognizes the importance of need to provide our information in Spanish to better promote and protect the civil, human and linguistic rights of all deaf people in the U.S.
As The National Council of Hispano Deaf and Hard of Hearing (NCHDHH) notes, statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center show that there are 51,927,000 Latinos in the United States, and 82% of Hispanic adults are conversant in Spanish. With such a large segment of the U.S. population speaking Spanish and needing information about the rights of deaf and hard of hearing children and adults, the NAD supports making our website accessible to this population.
“This was an important response to one of the priorities proposed at the 2012 Conference, and I am glad to see this completed in one year. This is proof of what our community can do together, from making motions at the NAD conference to working collaboratively to achieve goals. Through this effort, we are unifying our community and including all who communicate in Spanish. We thank our allies at the National Council of Hispano Deaf and Hard of Hearing (NCHDHH) for their assistance with this important initiative,” states the NAD President Chris Wagner.
Elvia Guillermo, NCHDHH President, shares excitement for the Spanish pages:
The NCHDHH thanks the National Association of the Deaf for its effort to provide Spanish language translation on some pages of the NAD’s website. This provides an opportunity for Deaf Latino people and parents of deaf Latino children to directly access information from the nation’s premier civil rights organization of, by and for deaf and hard of hearing individuals in the United States of America.
I look forward to collaborating with NAD to further increase the availability of Spanish language media for the rapidly growing Hispanic segment of the population.
The NAD was established in 1880 by deaf leaders who believed in the right of the American deaf community to use sign language, to congregate on issues important to them, and to have its interests represented at the national level. As a nonprofit federation, the mission of the NAD is to preserve, protect, and promote the civil, human, and linguistic rights of deaf and hard of hearing people in the United States. The advocacy scope of the NAD is broad, covering the breadth of a lifetime and impacting future generations in the areas of early intervention, education, employment, health care, technology, telecommunications, youth leadership, and more.