iSign: Making the Benefits of Reading Aloud Accessible to Families with Deaf Children

In this paper, we describe an application that helps hearing-impaired students learn to read and form words by translating speech into video clips of American Sign Language (ASL). The narrator, either a parent or teacher, reads aloud to the student, and the application displays the ASL clip(s) along with the written word(s). The student is thus able to observe the speaker form the words and then see a sign they recognize, the written word, and an illustration of the meaning of the word. We have developed a prototype system along with several “albums” containing the supporting multimedia.