VOCALHANDS: AN ONLINE LEARNING SYSTEM FOR THE AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

Sign Language is the primary language used by the Deaf. It is also used by their parents, children and many of those who find themselves constantly communicating with its primary users. Because of this, Sign Language is the 4th most widely used language worldwide. It gives the Deaf the opportunity to communicate with other people with a language they can use. Because of this, learning the language is essential to Deaf children and their families. The availability of an online learning system for Sign Language would definitely be helpful for the families of the Deaf who can‘t afford to learn outside the home. There are available online tools for learning Sign Language. However, most of them fall short of useful features and some are not free. These tools provide signed words and phrases through recorded videos which are not feasible for combining to form sentences. There have been studies made in translating the English language to American Sign Language, but there is none available online for practical use. Vocalhands, an online learning system for the American Sign Language, addresses these concerns by providing fully featured tutorials, including dictionaries, tests and English to ASL translator. They are presented in a form of a Content Management System to ease the administration for its back-end users, the Sign Language consultants, the Flash Animators and System Administrators. The Vocalhands translator uses Lexical Functional Transfer to successfully translate English to ASL with syntactic accuracy. The transfer is governed by a finite manageable group of translation rules and is processed through Grammar parsing and XML manipulation.