Trendspotting Tuesday: Sign Language on YouTube

All kinds of people connect on YouTube every second of every day, but this week we wanted to call attention to one especially vibrant community on the site: the hearing-impaired. Online video is proving to be an effective medium for deaf vloggers, entertainers, educators, activists and the sign-language-curious to talk to and connect with each other:

The videos on the home page today represent just a sliver of what's out there in terms of content made by or for the hearing impaired. We focused mostly on American Sign Language (ASL), but we also spotted signed videos in many other languages (like this one of the Swedish alphabet), and we loved seeing the site used by the deaf community to help organize a prom, to call out to cyclists and even to vent about a troublesome roommate. In other words, this week's Trendspotting Tuesday may be sign-language-themed, but really it's just another day in the life of YouTube...

Best,
The YouTube Team