There is a version of this that happens at a lot of otherwise competent conferences. The sign language interpreter is booked, they turn up, they are excellent, and they spend the day standing three metres stage left in a dim patch of the lighting rig, at an angle where a third of the room cannot see them clearly and the camera mix never cuts to them once.
The service was delivered and the access was not. Sign language interpreting services are unusual in that how you deliver them matters as much as who is doing the interpreting, and the delivery half is the part organisers most often inherit too late to fix.
If you only take one thing from this: book the specific sign language your audience actually uses. British Sign Language and American Sign Language are different languages, not regional accents of the same one, and an interpreter working in one cannot serve an audience using the other. Beyond that, budget two interpreters for anything running much past an hour. Send the interpreter clean programme audio and a video feed of the speaker rather than a room mic. Put the signer somewhere people can genuinely see them, which increasingly means their own phone rather than a corner of the stage. And run captions alongside, because they serve a different group.
The rest of this goes through each of those in turn, along with what remote interpreting changed about the economics and where the compliance obligations now sit.
On this page
Which sign language do you need
What remote interpreting changed
What the interpreter needs from you
Making sure the interpreter can be seen
Accessibility obligations: EAA, ADA and WCAG
Sign languages are not signed versions of spoken languages and they are not universal, which is the single most common misunderstanding in this area. British Sign Language and American Sign Language are mutually unintelligible. BSL uses a two-handed manual alphabet and ASL a one-handed one, and the grammars diverge well beyond that. Auslan sits closer to BSL than to ASL. International Sign is a contact variety used at international gatherings and it has its place, but the UN itself notes it is not as complex as natural sign languages and has a limited lexicon, so it is not a substitute for a national sign language in most settings.
The United Nations counts more than 300 sign languages in use worldwide, used by over 70 million deaf people, and describes them as "fully fledged natural languages, structurally distinct from the spoken languages".
So the question is never really "do we need a sign language interpreter". It is which Deaf audience you are serving and where they are. A London conference streaming to a substantial American audience may honestly need both BSL and ASL, and booking one of the two while describing the event as accessible is a mistake that gets noticed.
If you do not know, ask. Registration forms should carry an access requirements field, and it needs to be free text rather than a tickbox labelled "accessibility needs", because the tickbox tells you nothing you can act on.
The old constraint was availability. Qualified sign language interpreters, particularly ones who can handle conference-level content in a specialist domain, are thinly spread. If your event is in a city without a strong local pool you are flying somebody in, which means travel, accommodation and a day either side. For a one-hour panel that maths almost never survives contact with a budget review, and what gets cut is the access.
Remote interpreting breaks that link. Interprefy provides both spoken and signed interpretation, with sign language interpreters taking video and audio feeds from your event through the platform and their interpretation streamed back to attendees.
AVIXA is a good worked example. They ran their Women's and Diversity Council panel, Technology at the Service of Inclusion, during Integrated Systems Europe in Barcelona. No local BSL interpreters were available and flying one in for a single hour was not economical, so Interprefy worked with AV Department Ltd in Scotland to provide BSL remotely, alongside machine-translated Spanish captions.
Attendees watched the BSL feed and read the captions on their own phones. Carla Charlton, AVIXA's Manager of Live Content for EMEA, said afterwards that "the process to set everything up was smooth and the captioning and BSL interpretation was easy to access."
The whole thing is written up here: AVIXA, driving inclusion with AI-translated captions and sign language.
What is worth taking from that is not the technology. It is that a session which would previously have had no BSL at all, because the logistics could not be justified, got BSL from another country.
Remote sign language interpreting fails for dull, preventable reasons, and nearly all of them originate on the event side rather than the interpreter's.
They need a clean audio feed, because they are working from what they can hear. A room mic picking up air conditioning, chair scrape and the back of somebody's head will degrade the interpretation before it has started. Give them the programme audio, the same mix going to the recording.
They need video of the speaker, and ideally of the slides as well. Sign language interpreters lean on visual context constantly: what is on screen, where the speaker is pointing, who just cut across whom. Working blind from audio alone is possible and considerably worse.
They need materials in advance. Slide decks, speaker names, acronyms, running order. Fingerspelling an unfamiliar surname in real time is perfectly doable but it eats capacity, and in technical domains there may be signs that need agreeing before the day rather than invented during it.
And they need a named contact who is actually reachable while the event is running, for when the audio drops or the agenda slides by forty minutes. Interprefy's remote technical support exists for this, because somebody has to be watching the technical layer and it cannot be you, given that you are running an event.
This is the part that gets neglected, and it is where good provision quietly turns into poor access.
For people in the room, the interpreter feed can go to individual devices. Attendees open the Interprefy mobile app or a browser link on their phone and watch the signer there, which is what AVIXA did. There is a genuine advantage to this over a person on stage: the viewer controls size and angle, and nobody has to sit in a designated corner of the room to get a usable sightline.
If you are also putting the feed on a screen, size it properly. A signer in a small picture-in-picture box in the corner of a 16:9 slide is decorative rather than accessible. Handshape, facial expression and body position all need to read clearly, and facial expression in particular carries grammar in sign languages rather than just tone, so cropping it tight or shrinking it below legibility removes meaning and not just detail.
For online and hybrid attendees the feed runs either through your event platform where there is an integration, or through Interprefy's own browser widget alongside the main content. Interprefy works with 80+ meeting and event platforms including Zoom, Teams, Webex, Google Meet and ON24; the current list is on the integrations page.
People assume these two services cover the same need. They do not, and the assumption tends to run in one direction, with captions offered instead of interpretation on cost grounds.
For many Deaf people a national sign language is their first language and written English or French is a second one. Reading captions at conference pace, in a second language, while also watching a speaker and following a slide, is not equivalent access, whatever the caption accuracy. Meanwhile captions serve a much broader group that sign language does not reach: hard-of-hearing attendees who do not sign, non-native speakers, anyone in a badly mic'd breakout room, and the sizeable number of people who simply read faster than they listen.
Run both. Interprefy's live captions and subtitles produce real-time transcription in the floor language plus translated subtitles across 6,000+ language combinations, with better than 90% accuracy in good audio conditions. Loading a custom vocabulary of speaker names, product names and technical terms lifts that noticeably, and it is the cheapest quality improvement available to you. AVIXA ran BSL and Spanish captions together, which is the model worth copying.
Directive (EU) 2019/882, the European Accessibility Act, has applied across EU member states since 28 June 2025. It covers defined categories of products and services rather than every event, but those categories include services providing access to audiovisual media, and the directive explicitly references subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing and sign language interpretation among the accessibility features involved.
In the US, the Department of Justice's ADA Title II rule requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA for the web content and mobile apps of state and local government entities. The compliance dates were extended in April 2026 and now fall on 26 April 2027 for public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more, and 26 April 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments. WCAG 2.1 is the standard most procurement processes cite, and it is worth reading closely on this point. Success Criterion 1.2.4, captions for live audio, sits at Level AA. Success Criterion 1.2.6, sign language interpretation, sits at Level AAA. That gap is a large part of why so many organisations provide captions and stop there, and it is why "we meet WCAG AA" is not the same answer as "we provided sign language interpretation".
None of that is why you should provide sign language interpreting. It is increasingly why a client, funder or public sector partner will ask what you provided, and "we had captions" does not always answer the question. If you are being asked to evidence provision, our checklist on the trust signals worth demanding from suppliers covers the ground.
The knowledge base covers the specifics of how sign language interpreting is provisioned, including how the video feed reaches attendees on different platforms.
If you have an event with a sign language requirement and you are not sure how it fits what you have already built, particularly if it is in person and there is no local interpreter availability, talk to us. The AVIXA setup turned a panel that would have had nothing into a panel with BSL. That is usually the conversation worth having.