Today, Google honours and remembers the Welsh poet and deaf community activist, Dorothy Miles with an animated Doodle. The animated cartoons, which can be viewed on the Google search engine, are used to mark anniversaries of famous people. Today, Google highlights Miles, who is widely considered to be a pioneer of British Sign Language poetry.
The google doodle for Miles shows an animation of her signing a line from one of her poems. Before her death in 1993, Miles continuously worked to bridge the communication gap between deaf and hearing people as she focused her work on deaf issues.
Due to a type of meningitis that Miles contracted at a young age, she lived her life Deaf, attending the Royal School for the Deaf, before receiving a scholarship to be a student in Washington D.C. Post university, Miles attended the U.S National Theatre of the Deaf, where she began creating poems. Miles did not limit the audiences of her poems, writing in English, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL).
After a long stint in the US, Dorothy made her way back to the United Kingdom, where she began working for the British Deaf Association.
Here at Signature we would like to wish Dorothy Miles, a happy birthday, as we recognise her work at making communication more accessible.
