AF&RS is committed to making its services
accessible to all sections of the community. In this area you
can find out about how we work to improve the accessibility of
fire safety information and ways of contacting us for the
Deaf Community.
It is estimated that 15% of the population has some
degree of deafness - that’s about 150,000 people in the Avon area,
of these people over 1,000 are British Sign Language
users.
Fire
safety messages in British Sign Language (BSL).
Avon Fire & Rescue Service (AF&RS) worked in partnership
with Deafstation to provide a series of BSL videos on fire
safety, contacting us and organising a Home Fire Safety Visit.
You can now view the NHS Swine Flu
Leaflet in BSL on the Department of Health's
website.
You can also find information about the
South West Emergency SMS Text number, for
Deaf, deafened, hard of hearing and speech impaired people to
contact the Emergency Services in
the South West (including Avon Fire & Rescue
Service, Avon and Somerset Constabulary and Great Western Ambulance
Service) in an emergency.
Please note, if
you need to contact the emergency services anywhere else in the UK,
then you can now register for the national SMS emergency
text service. Set up by BT, the service is currently being
run on a trial basis by BT and requires potential users to register
their mobile number on a dedicated website, http://emergencysms.org.uk. Then,
in an emergency, you can contact a control operator by sending a
text to 999.
Fire Safety Information in BSL
Here you can find
Fire safety messages in British Sign Language (BSL)
(external website)
Working in partnership with Deafstation, from the University of
Bristol, we aim to take fire safety messages to a wider audience.
Take a look around the site, where you can find BSL videos on
general fire safety, including planning an escape route and smoking
safely, plus you can use the site to learn some basic BSL.
Thanks to Carolyn Nabarro for her help with the videos
If you would like to contact Avon Fire &
Rescue, follow the link