Fingerspelling - Indian Sign Language Training Tool
Tejas Nanaware, Sameer S. Sahasrabudhe, Nitin Ayer, Romey Christo · 2018
In India, about 12.3 million people are hearing impaired (moderate or complete). Indian Sign Language (ISL) which is developed specifically for Indians is taught in over 850 schools where few teachers have the task of training large class. Primary challenge is to have parity in terms of teaching ISL to entire class. Additionally, it is difficult to identify their mistakes and provide personalized corrective feedback. Fingerspelling is a gesture based animation app for teaching ISL. Fingerspelling consists of 'Learn' module: which demonstrates the ISL gestures; Practice module: which provides opportunity to the users to practice; and Test module: which checks the knowledge assimilation of the gestures. This app is built using free and open source tool: Blender. It has a desktop version and a web based version. Our preliminary user tests reveal that the hearing impaired students find this app extremely useful and friendly to use. They were pleasantly surprised to interact with an app which can speak 'their' language. We propose to address the technical issues and modify the app to train the hearing impaired in a better and more efficient manner.