Ishara Press is the publishing division of the Deaf Empowerment Foundation. Ishara is the word for ‘sign’ in a large area including the Arab world and several regions of Asia from Turkey via Iran and India up to Indonesia. As per the statutes, the aim of the Foundation is “to support tertiary education for deaf people and related academic research worldwide, with particular focus on developing countries, especially in subjects that are vital to the positive development of deaf communities, such as education (special education, distance education, etc), linguistics (sign language linguistics, applied linguistics, etc), and other subjects from the humanities and social studies (sociology, politics, psychology, administration, etc).”
In keeping with the aim of the Foundation, Ishara Press is primarily an academic publisher that seeks to disseminate peer-reviewed scholarly work within its defined range of publications to the international community, with special emphasis on making its publications accessible to deaf communities and to developing countries. A number of policies, such as a focus on multimedia and video-based publications, language policy, distribution policy, and benefits policy, support this aim. In addition to the academic publications portfolio, Ishara Press also publishes educational materials in both the written and the signed medium