Brought to you by Huawei
With less than a week to go to the big day, we thought we'd seen all the best Christmas adverts 2018 had to offer. This year has brought us many brilliant festive ads, but we think we've found the most meaningful one yet.
This advert from Huawei and StorySign featuring deaf child Maisie Sly will bring tears to your eyes:
The Irish Deaf Society and global technology leader, Huawei, have announced the launch of StorySign, an app that will help enrich story time for deaf children and their parents. StorySign was created with experts and charities from the deaf community to ensure it is a genuinely useful tool. The app features a friendly avatar, Star, who guides children and parents through a selected children’s book, translating it into perfect sign language and signing along to the story in real time.
There are approximately 32 million deaf children globally, and many struggle to learn to read, often due to a lack of resources bridging sign language and reading. New research from Huawei has indicated that parents of deaf children in Ireland spend more time reading to their children each day than parents of hearing children – an average of 67 minutes compared to 27 minutes – yet statistics indicate that they are falling behind their hearing peers with most deaf 16-year olds having an average reading age of nine years.
StorySign launched with a film by Academy Award® winning director Chris Overton and starring seven-year-old actress Maisie Sly, both of whom worked on Oscar®-winning short film The Silent Child. The StorySign film sees a young girl struggling to read with her father on Christmas Eve. Later that night when she sneaks downstairs to peek at her presents, she is stunned to see Santa who hands her a book for a gift. Upon realising that the little girl is deaf, Santa begins to sign the book to her and in that moment, she is the happiest little girl in the world, as he helps her enjoy the magic of story time.
Truly magical!