Developing a bilingual mobile dictionary for Indian Sign Language and gathering users experience with SignDict

Abstract

Availability of a sign language dictionary is very important for the literacy of deaf people. But the intricacies involved in the representation of the sign language impede attempts at representing it in a printed format. A video-based solution helps to solve this problem. This article discusses the development of a bilingual mobile sign language dictionary which has features for converting camera-captured text into sign language and translating simple sentences from a spoken language into their corresponding signs. Feedback from 2,900 users spread across India who have installed our mobile application indicates that users prefer mobile application for learning Indian Sign Language (ISL). Comparing the existing printed sign language dictionaries and other mobile-based ISL dictionaries with the mobile application we have developed, 45 stakeholders of a deaf school assessed that its features like easy availability, speed of operation, and character recognition are very effective in learning ISL.