Using ICT to Teach Sign Language

Abstract

In spite of the fastest growing of technologies of information and communication in the education and the development of very sophisticated environments to improve learning and education, there are a few tools dedicated to deaf education due to the difficulty to create content in sign language. In this context, we present in this paper an ICT environment we developed to aid deaf people improving their social integration and communication capabilities. Our environment is a specialized LCS that generates multimedia courses to teach and learn sign language. These courses can be used either by deaf pupils to learn (or e-learn) sign language or also by hearing people to be able to communicate with deaf people. This educational environment uses mainly a Web-based interpreter of sign language developed in our research laboratory and called Websign. It is a tool that permits to interpret automatically written texts in visual-gestured-spatial language using avatar technology.