The ArSL keyboard for android

Abstract

Despite the efforts of many organizations and governments, deaf people still forming a closed community isolated from the public society. The only way to communicate in a deaf community is the use of Sign Language. In fact, for deaf individuals, Sign Language is the main communication barrier with hearing people; either one side needs to learn the language of the other or they have to depend on a third-party interpreter. With technological advances, there have been many attempts to build a feasible bridge to connect deaf communities with the public. However, most of the developed techniques are complex and need special and expensive equipment which is not affordable for deaf people, especially in Arabic countries where deaf represents a significant proportion of the population mostly of medium and poor classes. Fortunately, mobile devices reached all hands recently creating a good opportunity to build a simple viable solution. Thus, we have developed an Android mobile application to support the Arabic Sign Language. Inspired by Chinese keyboards, we have embedded the language signs as a font to build a user-friendly keyboard. It helps a deaf person to construct Arabic Sign Language sentences and to ask the application to convert them into standard Arabic text or speech. Moreover, the application works the other way around and translates from standard Arabic to Arabic Sign Language forming a simple mechanism for seamless communications between hearing and deaf people. Finally, we have tested our solution with a number of volunteers from deaf and hearing communities and the results were promising.