SignIt! An Android Game for Sign Bilingual Play
Roshni Poddar, Pradyumna YM, Divya Prabha Jayakumar, Tarini Naik, Punyat Tripathi, Nabeel TP, Hemanth Reddy Yeddula, Pratyush Kumar, Mohit Kumar Jain, Manohar Swaminathan · 2023
The Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community constitutes over 430 million people globally, with about 70 million of them using sign language as their primary means of communication. Learning sign language poses significant challenges, and researchers have explored the potential of digital games as educational tools for teaching sign language. However, existing educational games are limited to a narrow range of words and feature only single-player modes. Consequently, our objective was to design a sign language-based game that not only facilitates learning but also enables social gameplay and encourages user-generated content. In this work, we present SignIt!, an accessible quiz platform co-designed with the DHH community. SignIt! empowers DHH players to play sign language-based quizzes either individually or in competitive settings, as well as to create their own quiz content. Through a user study involving five DHH participants, we found SignIt! was deemed easy-to-learn, intuitive, and accessible by our participants. They expressed various motivations for using SignIt!, including passing time, learning quiz content, and connecting with friends.