Accessibility, deaf, sign languages, Indian Sign Language, Nepali Sign Language, ePub3, SAPPS
We were recently asked to design teaching tools to allow Indian Deaf Sign Language to be widely used in rural India. Here there is no Internet bandwidth, or it is just unaffordable for the target users. This is what we are doing.
We were recently asked to produce interactive tools to allow Indian Deaf Sign Language to be taught in rural India. In this environment there is no significant Internet bandwidth, or it is just unaffordable for the target users. A main objective was to be able to make an easily deliverable Sign Language learning application.
That means delivered and installed from any storage device, network or the Internet, to a computer or tablet. It has to be small and easy to transport and should have no installation dependencies. File size is incredibly important. While a set of YouTube videos is one useful teaching tool, it doesn't do the job in deeply rural environments.
We already have a number of tools addressing hand writing and light-weight interactive learning tools. We call these SAPPS (SVG Apps) as discussed in a previous post. A SAPP is a stand-alone SVG file that contains Javascript and CSS. We are also heavily into hand created or hand optimized SVG to get it to the smallest file size possible.
While we handle the "back-end" information accumulation problem we needed a warm up exercise to evaluate the technology and techniques to create great learning tools for the Indian Sign Language.
The ASL Starter Kit
Unsurprisingly the American Sign Language (ACL) has the best available information on the Internet. For many countries information about their sign languages does not seem to have exploited the Internet so far. So here is our first pass.
