Employees of shops Fashion&Friends in Belgrade were recently trained in basic sign language, in order to properly provide the service to customers with impaired hearing.
The training which was carried out in
Fashion&Friends stores is aimed at raising awareness about the existence of deaf people, as well as employees on the basics of Serbian Sign Language. Benefit is manifold - from the integration of the deaf community, ensuring accessibility of information, as well as the promotion and the Serbian sign language and its use in everyday communication.
The training program had several phases: positioning, geometric forms, the use of arms in the description, personal pronouns, verbs, adjectives, terms from different fields of life all the way to the final sentence. It is about 24 academic hours, which includes over 1,000 terms and their application in sentences, and the last 6 hours are narrowly specialized in the field of work of the company that organizes the training. Students who are employed in the
Fashion&Friends stores in Belgrade are familiar with issues related to clothing, textiles, brands, sizes, and special attention is paid to work for their kindness in providing services to deaf customers.
Municipal Organization of the Deaf Belgrade (GOGB), as well as many other organizations of the deaf throughout Serbia in cooperation with the company „
Talking Hands“that held the training, always welcomes such initiatives. In this manner
Fashion Company, owner of the most famous multi-brand chain stores
Fashion&Friends, proving that belongs to socially responsible companies that care about the community. In the future employees in Novi Sad, Kragujevac and Nis will be trained as well.
According to the latest data of the World Health Organization, Serbia has over 120,000 deaf and hard of hearing people, and more than 30,000 are sign language users, who consider it their mother tongue. For them, the Serbian language (speech) is actually a second language.
