Creating sign language web pages

Abstract

For many people the World Wide Web has become an indispensable tool for work and entertainment. However, for people using sign languages, which convey meaning by gestures moving in time and space, the primarily static and textual nature of the WWW medium has, until now, posed an important challenge. Signing linguistic communities should be able to develop their own signing Webs that include hyperlinks based on moving gestures and signs instead of using static images or text for links. We present a mechanism, signlinks, and a content authoring tool, SignEd., that can facilitate development of such Webs, without requiring any degree of bilingualism with a written language by the user. Preliminary evaluations indicate the users are able to understand and create signlinks for video content. Four major design modifications were made as a result of these evaluations and are presented in this paper. © Springer-Verlag 2004.