Assistive malaysian sign language application for D/HH learning using visual phonics

Abstract

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning. In Malaysia, children are taught to spell the words using a combination of consonants and vowels. Despite the assistance and encouragement extended by the Malaysian government for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (D/ HH), assistive applications for D/HH people, especially applications based on local content, are still evidently lacking. This research focuses on Malaysian Sign language (MySL), aiming to determine Malaysian D/HH challenges and to propose an application design that can enhance and improve their skills. This paper is to report on D/HH learning, identify teaching challenges, investigate the existing MySL approaches, identify MySL elements, introduce Visual Phonics and propose MySL application design that can enhance and improves D/HH learning in Malaysia.