Deaf to design website for deaf film/ TV festival

Deaf Trainees are designing the first website for the forthcoming 5th Deaf Film and Television Festival, after being recruited from magazine ads for a two-week Internet course.

The course has been developed by the Department for Trade and Industry and Metapod, a Wolverhampton-based organisation which promotes the use of technology in creative industries.

The collaboration aims to produce an interactive site for the October festival, part of the British Deaf Association’s Deaf Awareness Week. The site will be designed using accessible software packages such as Dreamweaver.

Metapod director Evelyn Wilson says it hopes to create an active website with chatroom provision to connect deaf people with each other. “We want visitors to use the site before, during and after the festival to swap ideas, and it must also be user-friendly for visually impaired people, with large text sizes,” she says.

The course will be taught by Ramon Woolfe and Mark Nelson of Remark!, which specialises in multimedia and Web design. Its previous work includes designing websites and training courses for the BDA.