Search Results (88)

Wearable technologies offer practical opportunities for assistive communication and educational support in introductory sign language learning. This paper presents an IoT-enabled smart glove for deterministic static sign language recognition over a bounded vocabulary of 15 isolated static gestures, comprising digits (0–9) and five vowel handshapes (A, E, I, O, U). The system is intended for foundational static gesture and posture practice and is not designed or validated for dynamic gestures, coarticulated signing, continuous sign language recognition, or sentence-level translation. The prototype integrates five 2.2-inch (55.9 mm) resistive flex sensors and an MPU6050 3-axis accelerometer, performs acquisition, exponential moving average filtering, user-specific calibration, normalization, and deterministic classification on a NodeMCU ESP32 board, and transmits selected processed variables to Arduino Cloud through MQTT for remote monitoring. A 10 s calibration routine maps user-specific open-hand and closed-fist responses into normalized flex-sensor ranges, allowing the same deterministic rule structure to operate across participants without model retraining. Experimental evaluation with 10 healthy adult participants aged 20–41 years (mean age: 27 years), all familiar with sign language and all providing written informed consent, produced a balanced dataset of 1500 labeled steady-state sensor vectors. The class-averaged recognition rate was 92.8%, and leave-one-subject-out validation produced a subject-wise accuracy of $92.80\pm 2.03\%$, with individual participant accuracies ranging from 90.00% to 96.00%. The local embedded processing pipeline required less than 2 ms per cycle, the complete path including MQTT visualization produced approximately 150 ms end-to-end latency, and the device operated for up to 14 h using a 3.7 V, 1000 mAh Li-Po battery. The results indicate that calibrated deterministic sensor fusion can provide a low-cost, low-latency, edge-executed solution for bounded static sign-language gesture learning tasks while maintaining stable short-term subject-wise performance under controlled experimental conditions. Full article

Across sub-Saharan Africa, Deaf congregants often remain excluded from worship, leadership, and theological formation because church practices privilege spoken communication and underinvest in sign-language access. This article develops a hearing-mediated, contextual artificial intelligence (AI) theology of disability for the African church through qualitative document analysis of the published literature on disability, Ubuntu, African ecclesiology, and emerging AI accessibility tools. This article does not report primary empirical data, but offers a conceptual synthesis requiring Deaf-led validation. Using the Contextual Disability Paradigm and Ubuntu philosophy as interpretive lenses, the article argues that AI can expand access through offline-first translation and captioning tools, but it can also weaken embodied, cross-ability relationship if technology becomes a substitute for relational labour, sign-language learning, and Deaf leadership. The article’s central contribution is the concept of the efficiency-relationality paradox: the more efficiently AI removes communicative barriers, the less incentive may remain for embodied mutuality. Because the analysis is based entirely on secondary sources and includes no Deaf-produced materials, the findings are provisional and structurally limited. The article concludes that any credible AI theology of disability in Africa must be offline-first, data-just, denominationally adaptable, and directed toward Deaf-led co-research and co-theology. Full article

This paper proposes a unified methodological framework for evaluating heterogeneous approaches to avatar-based sign language visualization. The study introduces a four-dimensional analytical framework based on four independent criteria: (A1) pipeline architecture and degree of automation, (A2) data and annotation requirements, (A3) portability across sign languages and domains, and (A4) integration and accessibility. The framework is applied to a comparative analysis of three dominant paradigms: (P1) notation → animation (e.g., HamNoSys), (P2) writing-based representation → animation (e.g., SignWriting), and (P3) keypoint-based animation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. The comparative assessment shows that the differences between the paradigms are structural and reflect trade-offs among linguistic accuracy, automation level, scalability, and user accessibility, rather than the superiority of any one technology. Overall, the structured comparative framework (A1–A4) is applied for analyzing three paradigms of sign language avatar generation. It enables a systematic evaluation of architectural, data-related, and practical characteristics, highlighting key trade-offs between linguistic accuracy, scalability, and accessibility. Full article

Filipino Sign Language (FSL) serves as a vital means of communication for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing in the Philippines. However, its societal use remains limited due to the scarcity of qualified interpreters and the general lack of FSL literacy among the population. Therefore, this study aims to address the gap between FSL development and automated FSL translation by employing machine learning and computer vision techniques. A model was trained using the FSL-105 dataset, which comprises video clips of gestures related to greetings and colors, and utilized MediaPipe for real-time detection of hand, face, and body landmarks. Through iterative training with transfer learning, the model’s performance improved from an initial accuracy of 80% to a final accuracy of 98.75%. The results demonstrate that the MediaPipe-based model can reliably interpret FSL gestures, positioning it as a potentially accessible assistive tool for the Deaf and hard of hearing community. This technology holds promise for applications in education, healthcare, and public service, offering new opportunities to promote the social inclusion of Filipino Deaf communities through more inclusive communication. Full article

Persistent communication barriers for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community in the Philippines are addressed in this study by developing a Filipino Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system. The system focuses on transactional signs commonly used in commercial environments such as markets and public facilities, thereby filling a gap left by existing SLR models. A vision-based approach was adopted, employing MediaPipe for landmark detection and Gated Recurrent Units for translating signs into text. To train the model, a custom dataset comprising 1065 video samples of 26 transactional signs was created, accounting for subtle variations in individual signing styles. The complete system was implemented on a Raspberry Pi 5 equipped with a webcam and touchscreen display. When evaluated on unseen data, the system achieved a recognition accuracy of 87%, demonstrating its potential for real-world applications in supporting commercial interactions for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Full article

A substantial number of students with hearing impairments are enrolled in higher education, motivating the development of inclusive assistive technologies that reduce communication barriers. This study developed and evaluated a prototype electronic glove that translates Mexican Sign Language (LSM) signs into Spanish text using machine learning. Eight participants (four deaf and four hearing with LSM proficiency) completed four sessions involving 12 signs; three sessions (S1–S3) were used for model development and one session (T) was held out for evaluation. Models were trained on S1–S3 and tested on T using a session-level split without window mixing across sessions; therefore, results represent a speaker-dependent, inter-session pilot assessment rather than a speaker-independent generalization test. The glove integrates flex sensors and an inertial measurement unit IMU MPU6050 connected to an ESP32-C3 SuperMini microcontroller. These components were selected due to their low cost, availability, and ease of integration, making them suitable for the development of accessible wearable assistive technologies. Under this protocol, the system achieved a window-level overall test accuracy of 97.0% (95% CI computed at the window level: 96.00–97.00), with higher performance for the dynamic subset (98.0%) than for the static subset (95.0%), and an algorithmic decision delay of 1.2 s. Usability and acceptance were evaluated using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)-based questionnaire. The mean SUS score was 50.6 ± 1.8 (marginal usability), while participants reported positive perceptions across TAM constructs. Overall, findings demonstrate technical feasibility under controlled inter-session conditions and provide a foundation for iterative user-centered refinement, followed by strict speaker-independent validation and classroom deployment studies in future work. Full article

This paper presents the first prototype of a speech-to-sign language translation system for Kazakh Sign Language (KRSL). The proposed pipeline integrates the NVIDIA FastConformer model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the Kazakh language and addresses the challenges of sign language translation in a low-resource setting. Unlike American or British Sign Languages, KRSL lacks publicly available datasets and established translation systems. The pipeline follows a multi-stage process: speech input is converted into text via ASR, segmented into phrases, matched with corresponding gestures, and visualized as sign language. System performance is evaluated using word error rate (WER) for ASR and accuracy metrics for speech-to-sign translation. This study also introduces the first KRSL dataset, consisting of 1200 manually recreated signs, including 95% static images and 5% dynamic gesture videos. To improve robustness under resource-constrained conditions, a Weighted Hybrid Similarity Score (WHSS)-based gesture matching method is proposed. Experimental results show that the FastConformer model achieves an average WER of 10.55%, with 7.8% for isolated words and 13.3% for full sentences. At the phrase level, the system achieves 92.1% accuracy for unigrams, 84.6% for bigrams, and 78.3% for trigrams. The complete pipeline reaches 85% accuracy for individual words and 70% for sentences, with an average latency of 310 ms. These results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system for supporting people with hearing and speech impairments in Kazakhstan. Full article

A persistent challenge for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals is the communication gap between sign language users and the hearing community, particularly in regions with limited automated translation resources. In Saudi Arabia, this gap is amplified by the reliance on Saudi Sign Language (SSL) and the scarcity of real-time, sentence-level translation systems. This paper presents a real-time system for sentence-level recognition of continuous SSL and direct mapping to natural spoken Arabic. The proposed system operates end-to-end on live video streams or pre-recorded content, extracting spatio-temporal landmark features using the MediaPipe Holistic framework. For classification, the input feature vector consists of 225 features derived from hand and body pose landmarks. These features are processed by a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network trained on the ArabSign (ArSL) dataset to perform direct sentence-level classification over a vocabulary of 50 continuous Arabic sign language sentences, supported by an idle-based segmentation mechanism that enables natural, uninterrupted signing. Experimental evaluation demonstrates robust generalization: under a Leave-One-Signer-Out (LOSO) cross-validation protocol, the model attains a mean sentence-level accuracy of 94.2%, outperforming the fixed signer-independent split baseline of 92.07%, while maintaining real-time performance suitable for interactive use. To enhance linguistic fluency, an optional post-recognition refinement stage is incorporated using a large language model (LLM), followed by text-to-speech synthesis to produce audible Arabic output; this refinement operates strictly as post-processing and is not included in the reported recognition accuracy metrics. The results demonstrate that direct sentence-level modeling, combined with landmark-based feature extraction and real-time segmentation, provides an effective and practical solution for continuous SSL sentence recognition in real-time. Full article

The foundation of an automatic sign language training (ASLT) system lies in word-level sign language recognition (WSLR), which refers to the translation of captured sign language signals into sign words. However, two key issues need to be addressed in this field: (1) the number of sign words in all public sign language datasets is too small, and the words do not match real-world scenarios, and (2) only single-view sign videos are typically provided, which makes solving the problem of hand occlusion difficult. In this work, we design an efficient algorithm for WSLR which is trained on our recently released NationalCSL-DP dataset. The algorithm first performs frame-level alignment of dual-view sign videos. A two-stage deep neural network is then employed to extract the spatiotemporal features of the signers, including hand motions and body gestures. Furthermore, a front-view guided early fusion (FvGEF) strategy is proposed for effective fusion of features from different views. Extensive experiments were carried out to evaluate the algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperformed existing dual-view sign language recognition algorithms. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm achieves Top-1 accuracy on the NationalCSL6707 dataset that is 10.29 and 11.38 higher than MViT and CNN + Transformer, respectively. Full article

This study presents a real-time, bidirectional system for translating American Sign Language (ASL) to and from English using computer vision and transformer-based models to enhance accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing users. Leveraging publicly available sign language and text–to-gloss datasets, the system integrates MediaPipe-based holistic landmark extraction with CNN- and transformer-based architectures to support translation across video, text, and speech modalities within a web-based interface. In the ASL-to-English direction, the sign-to-gloss model achieves a 25.17% word error rate (WER) on the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T benchmark, which is competitive with recent continuous sign language recognition systems, and the gloss-level translation attains a ROUGE-L score of 79.89, indicating strong preservation of sign content and ordering. In the reverse English-to-ASL direction, the English-to-Gloss transformer trained on ASLG-PC12 achieves a ROUGE-L score of 96.00, demonstrating high-fidelity gloss sequence generation suitable for landmark-based ASL animation. These results highlight a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off achieved through compact model architectures and low-latency decoding, supporting practical real-time deployment. Full article

The growing Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community faces communication challenges due to a global shortage of certified sign language interpreters. Therefore, developing efficient and secure sign language machine translation (SLMT) systems is essential. Current work addresses the accuracy of the sign language translation task. However, there is a need for an SLMT system that encompasses privacy, efficiency, translation accuracy, and Machine Learning development operations. This paper addresses this void by proposing a novel consent-aware privacy-preserving end-to-end edge, cloud, and blockchain integrated computing system. We evaluate the system by comparing the mostly used Encoder–Decoder Transformer and a lightweight Adaptive Transformer (ADAT), using two datasets: the most comprehensive sign language dataset RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T (PHOENIX14T), and MedASL, our newly developed medical-domain dataset. A comparative analysis of translation quality on PHOENIX14T shows that ADAT improves BLEU-4 by 0.02 absolute points and ROUGE-L by 0.11. On MedASL, ADAT gains 0.01 in BLEU-4 and 0.02 in ROUGE-L. For runtime efficiency on MedASL, ADAT reduces training time by 50% and lowers both edge–cloud and end-to-end system communication times by 2%. Full article

This research presents a novel, real-time Pakistani Sign Language (PSL) recognition system utilizing a custom-designed sensory glove integrated with advanced machine learning techniques. The system aims to bridge communication gaps for individuals with hearing and speech impairments by translating hand gestures into readable text. At the core of this work is a smart glove engineered with five resistive flex sensors for precise finger flexion detection and a 9-DOF Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for capturing hand orientation and movement. The glove is powered by a compact microcontroller, which processes the analog and digital sensor inputs and transmits the data wirelessly to a host computer. A rechargeable 3.7 V Li-Po battery ensures portability, while a dynamic dataset comprising both static alphabet gestures and dynamic PSL phrases was recorded using this setup. The collected data was used to train two models: a Support Vector Machine with feature extraction (SVM-FE) and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning network. The LSTM model outperformed traditional methods, achieving an accuracy of 98.6% in real-time gesture recognition. The proposed system demonstrates robust performance and offers practical applications in smart home interfaces, virtual and augmented reality, gaming, and assistive technologies. By combining ergonomic hardware with intelligent algorithms, this research takes a significant step toward inclusive communication and more natural human–machine interaction. Full article

Every day, countless individuals with hearing or speech disabilities struggle to communicate effectively, as their conditions limit conventional verbal interaction. For them, sign language becomes an essential and often sole tool for expressing thoughts and engaging with others. However, the general public’s limited understanding of sign language poses a major barrier, often resulting in social, educational, and professional exclusion. To bridge this communication gap, the present study proposes a smart wearable glove system designed to translate Arabic sign language (ArSL), especially Moroccan sign language (MSL), into a written alphabet in real time. The glove integrates five MPU6050 motion sensors, one on each finger, capable of capturing detailed motion data, including angular velocity and linear acceleration. These motion signals are processed using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), implemented directly on a Raspberry Pi Pico through embedded machine learning techniques. A custom dataset comprising labeled gestures corresponding to the MSL alphabet was developed for training the model. Following the training phase, the neural network attained a gesture recognition accuracy of 98%, reflecting strong performance in terms of reliability and classification precision. We developed an affordable and portable glove system aimed at improving daily communication for individuals with hearing impairments in Morocco, contributing to greater inclusivity and improved accessibility. Full article

This study investigates the challenges of promoting accessibility for deaf teachers and students in higher education, focusing on the development of inclusive teaching materials. A qualitative case study was conducted in ten teacher training programmes at the Federal University of Alagoas (Brazil), including nine distance learning courses and one face-to-face LIBRAS programme. Analysis of the Virtual Learning Environment revealed a predominance of text-based content, with limited use of Libras videos, visual resources, or assistive technologies. The integration of Brazilian Sign Language into teaching practices was minimal, and digital translation tools were rarely used or contextually appropriate. Educators reported limited training, technical support, and institutional guidance for the creation of accessible materials. Time constraints and resource scarcity further hampered inclusive practices. The results highlight the urgent need for institutional policies, continuous teacher training, multidisciplinary support teams, and the strategic use of digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Compared with previous studies, significant progress has been made. The present study highlights the establishment of an Accessibility Centre (NAC) and an Accessibility Laboratory (LAB) at the university. These facilities are designed to support the development of policies for the inclusion of people with disabilities, including deaf students, and to assist teachers in designing educational resources, which is essential for enhancing accessibility and learning outcomes. Artificial intelligence tools—such as sign language translators including Hand Talk, VLibras, SignSpeak, Glove-Based Systems, the LIBRAS Online Dictionary, and the Spreadthesign Dictionary—can serve as valuable resources in the teaching and learning process. Full article

Discourse markers have been extensively studied in spoken languages from different perspectives, covering monolingual, contrastive, and translation studies. However, research on these items remains limited for signed languages, with only a handful of scattered publications. Following a corpus-based approach, this paper aims to investigate discourse markers in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), including their types, functions, and translation/s into written French. An 18 min sample of three dialogues and six signers was analyzed using a two-level independent taxonomy (domain and function) previously applied to spoken and signed data. Overall, 251 discourse markers were identified in the LSFB sample. They can be manual, nonmanual, or a combination of both, the latter type being the most frequent. In contrast to the previous literature, discourse markers cannot be spatial in LSFB. Regarding their functional spectrum, most discourse markers belong to the sequential domain (i.e., they are mostly used to structure discourse) and express ‘addition’ (i.e., providing more information) or ‘monitoring’ (i.e., keeping control over one’s turn or over the interaction). When examining the translation of DMs, most are either omitted or substituted by other non-discourse marking items in the target texts. Although these results are generally similar to previous studies on DMs in spoken languages, more research on these items in other signed languages is needed to obtain a precise overview of their role in human communication. Full article