Sign search and sign synthesis made easy to end user: The paradigm of building a SL oriented interface for accessing and managing educational content

Abstract

Accessibility of electronic content by deaf and hard-of-hearing WWW users is crucially depending on the possibility to acquire information that can be presented in their native sign language (SL), from the vast amounts of text sources being constantly uploaded. Similarly crucial is the ability to easily create new electronic content that can enable dynamic message exchange, covering various communication needs. Given that during the last decade, there have been created considerable language resources for a number of SLs worldwide, integration of a set of deaf accessibility aids in combination with standard Language Technology (LT) tools for text handling in the various platforms serving tasks of current everyday life, may drastically improve access to Web services by deaf and hard-of-hearing (HoH) populations. In this paper, we present the example of integration of a set of tools which enable written content accessibility and dynamic student-student/student-teacher interaction via SL, as applied on the official educational content platform of the Greek Ministry of Education for the primary and secondary education levels, exploiting Greek Sign Language (GSL) resources.