Assistive technology for improved literacy among the deaf and hard of hearing

We describe an assistive technology for improved literacy among the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, that is cost-wise and accessible to deaf individuals and their families/service providers (e.g., educators), businesses which employ them or list them as customers and healthcare professionals. The technology functions as (1) A real-time translation system between Moroccan Sign Language (a visual-gestural language) and standard written Arabic. Moroccan Sign Language (MSL) is a visual/gestural language that is distinct from spoken Moroccan Arabic and Modern Standrad Arabic (SA) and has no text representation. In this context, we describe some challenges in SA-to-MSL machine translation. In Arabic, word structure is not built linearly as is the case in concatenative morphological systems, which results in a large space of of morphological variation. The language has a large degree of ambiguity in word senses, and further ambiguity attributable to a writing system that omits diacritics. (e.g. short vowels, consonant...