ASL Book of Mormon on DVD By Brittany Karford, Church Magazines The American Sign Language Book of Mormon is now available in DVD format, making it easier for the deaf community to own their own copies and study the scriptures. For Elder Dylan Clarke, it means a world of difference for his family and the people he serves. “What does this mean for the ASL community? Everything,” he says. He grew up learning ASL with his family to communicate with and support his deaf brother, Daniel, and now serves as an ASL missionary in the Fort Lauderdale Florida Mission. Along with ASL missionaries nationwide, he is trading in 17 VHS tapes for the 17-DVD set. “As a missionary force we are excited and loving it,” he says. It means no more lugging around a bag of tapes, no more cuing to select scriptures, and a format they can dispense easily to investigators. “Previously, the only people who had the whole set were members,” Elder Clarke says, explaining that they couldn't exactly hand out sets of 17 VHS tapes to every investigator. Most of what they gave investigators to read were children’s Book of Mormon stories, to overcome the language barrier between ASL and the written word. A common misconception is that the deaf community can simply read material the same as English speakers, but the languages are structured differently, making reading and comprehension levels incomparable. “By providing the Book of Mormon in their language, they can comprehend it just as you and I,” says Doug Hind, a special curriculum specialist in the Church Curriculum Department. And at $2.50 a set, the DVD collection is a compact, lightweight gift missionaries can distribute at will. Cracking open the DVD boxed set, Brother Hind is pleased to hold them in his hands after three years of hard work to reformat the tapes onto discs. Inside, 17 leaflet pages hold the DVDs, containing a higher quality version of the same footage on the VHS tapes, in which Minnie Mae Wilding-Diaz personally signed the entire book over a period of 6 to 8 years. The footage may be the same, but the most important feature of the DVDs is the ability to search the scriptures by every 10 verses. Previously, finding a specific scripture was difficult for the deaf—they just had to fast-forward and guess. Now they can navigate the scriptures at the touch of a button, and for members with iPod technology or portable DVD players, they can take the ASL Book of Mormon with them anywhere. This full-translation format for ASL scripture appears to be the first of its kind. “No scripture has ever been done like this as a true translation—even the Bible,” Brother Hind says, adding that they are in the process of translating the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. For now, Elder Clarke is simply grateful for the ASL Book of Mormon DVD. “The work that went into this was tremendous and means everything to those who use it,” he said. “This will help the deaf community as a whole to really study the scriptures.”