Wikimedia MKD got a commercial bank to fund sign-language banking vocabulary

Users of the Macedonian Sign Language told Wikimedia MKD that communicating with bank officers was one of the main difficulties they faced in public. The chapter had already run a 2024 project producing videos of basic economic and legal terms in sign language, funded by the Wikimedia Foundation — but it had only covered basic terminology.

For the follow-up, Wikimedia MKD changed the funding, not just the content: instead of the foundation, the project was fully funded by a Macedonian commercial bank, won through the bank's call for grant applications supporting social inclusion of people with disabilities. The funder is the very institution whose counter — queues, forms, currency risk, non-performing loans — deaf users said they couldn't navigate.

Production ran from February to August 2026 in three phases: an economic expert compiled 40 banking terms with brief definitions and simple examples, using the National Bank's glossary as a basis; a professional interpreter conceptualized how to render them comprehensively in sign; and the 40 finished videos were uploaded to their category on Wikimedia Commons with Macedonian subtitles.

Fund phase two not from the foundation but from a commercial bank — the counterparty deaf users said they couldn't communicate with — via its inclusion grant.

The funding closes a loop most grants miss: the content's subject and the funder are the same relationship — the bank pays to repair its own customer conversations.

It scales a proven template — the 2024 economic-and-legal-terms project — while upgrading both the depth of terminology and the source of money.

The output lives on Wikimedia Commons under open license with subtitles, so the vocabulary is permanent public infrastructure, not a bank's marketing asset.

The cheapest way to fund niche accessibility content is to find the funder whose own customer journey it repairs — the bank pays to make its own counters workable in sign language.

Wikimedia MKD plans to continue the project with videos in other scientific fields, given the value the community sees — but the roadmap is uncertain, because the plan is to rely fully on external funding.