An overlooked marketing opportunity

Recently, I was facilitating training which comprised of a variety of business people. Among them were a small group of the hearing impaired and a translator, using American Sign Language.  They attended the entire series of sessions and my curiosity got the better of me as we were discussing the topic of operations.

I asked the translator when signing how many languages would be able to understand. Needless to say, it was an eye opener the response I got. When signing in that particular method people who understood English and Spanish could understand.

Wow! So why are more of us NOT learning to sign? We would expand our communication methods much more. As a tourism destination, it may give us a marketing edge being able to communicate with a more wide cross-section of people. What would that mean for the island of Barbados/The Caribbean? Maybe we should start learning to sign and find out.