Author: giorgos.i@citizensinpower.org

Sign language is, as defined by Britannica, ‘any means of communication through bodily movements, especially of the hands and arms, used when spoken communication is impossible or not desirable’.  

 Although sign language is the main form of communication used in the deaf community, most of the people in the hearing community are not familiar with it. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report in 2020, there are more than 466 million deaf people in the world (World Health Organization, 2022) using different forms of sign languages, a few of which are American Sign Language, Greek Sign Language, French Sign Language, Spanish Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, Italian Sign Language, Arabic Sign Language. 

There is the belief according to Rastgoo et al., (2024, p.1) that to make easy and mutual communication ‘between the hearing-impaired and the hearing communities, building a robust system capable of translating the spoken language into sign language and vice versa is fundamental.’ To work on this and provide solutions, different proposed applications were given, especially in the American Sign Language community, where these barriers were tried to be tackled. It was proposed that models such as avatar approaches, conditional image / video generation approaches should be used despite the small set of phrases. Tornay et al., (2020) also designed a Sign Language Production approach by using hand shape, hand movement, mouthing and facial expression.  

The need to develop communication among deaf and hard of hearing people with the non-deaf community, seems to be increasing and that is why many sign language applications are being developed to help fulfill this gap, either by using special devices with motion detection or by using images processing methods (Jebali et al., 2021). There were also researchers who developed methods to translate voice or text into sign language (Dadiz et al., 2017) or even smartphone-based sign language applications (Muzahidin & Rakun, 2020). An example of this would be the ‘English Today’ and ‘Google Glass’ which were developed by Berger and Maly (2019), are seen as useful applications that offer new ways for teaching not only deaf people but also blind. 

Overall, the need to develop appropriate tools such as mobile apps is vital as it will connect the hearing community to the non-hearing one. The benefits in having sign language in schools will allow for a better communication and enable all students to connect with each other, and by doing so an inclusive learning environment would be the success of such decision as cultural awareness and respect will be the highlights.