Multimedia with Animated Sign Language for Deaf Learners
Margriet Verlinden, Inge Zwitserlood, Han Frowein · 2005
Abstract: This paper describes how animated sign language can be integrated into multimedia teaching material for deaf learners with a sign language as their first language. For the creation of animated sign language special techniques were developed in which the animation is driven by a special sign language notation system. This socalled synthetic animation enables a trained sign language user to easily create signed content at the computer at his/her own pace. To demonstrate and evaluate the quality of synthetic signing, several web applications were developed and tested with deaf users. The results were sufficiently promising to develop other applications and our focus is now on educational applications for deaf pupils at primary and secondary level. Several examples of this are presented. Deaf children have insufficient access to spoken language input for normal language acquisition. Because of this, the spoken language and reading skills of many deaf people are often, at best, those of a second language. Recent research in the Netherlands (Wouters 2005) shows that only 25 % of deaf adolescents up to 20 years old have reading skills that equal those of hearing nine year olds. On the other hand, many people who were born deaf or became deaf before they learned to speak have acquired a sign language as their first language. It is now generally