These are some steps of how a developer could benefit from integrating our SigningAvatar Technology with their work to make their materials accessible to the Deaf/Hard of Hearing communities.

1. Developers send English text to us.
2. We review it to identify changes for Deaf and Hard of Hearing students
3. We use Sign Smith Studio to script the American Sign Language (and/or Signed English) translations.
4. Sometimes we have to animate new signs using Gesture Builder.
5. We send back a spreadsheet with translations in our “script” format.
6. And we create Web pages for the developer.
7. The developers create a web site using the page(s) we provide.

Vcom3D works with partners to evaluate in schools and make changes based on results.

Our team of educational and sign language experts are always interested in assisting organizations in providing the sign language element to any and all web pages. This simply makes good sense and helps make information accessible to a greatly underserved community.

Judy, perhaps you could describe how this process has benefited TERC.

One organization has explored the possibility of integrating our SigningAvatar Technology along with Gesture Builder to create foreign sign language outputs to teach about basic health care, life and awareness in 3rd world countries.

With both Sign Smith Studio and Gesture Builder, you can create videos that would share critical health care materials with Deaf and Hard of Hearing people.

These videos do have image enabled feature that would allow the Deaf user to see images and with our foreground images there is an ability to add captions which makes these materials universally accessible to bring health care information to the critical mass.

Since I am in the healthcare field and want to see how healthcare industry can use this software to make their healtchare services more accessible to the Deaf clients?

This is Judy from TERC. Heidi mentions the Signing Science Dictionary and you mention TERC as involved in doing research on Vcom3D’s work. I think it might be interesting (and useful) for others to find out what goes on from your perspective when an organization such as TERC assumes the role of the primary contractor and Vcom3D the role of the subcontractor to develop products that integrate Vcom3D’s Avatar technology. My reason for suggesting this is that it might point the way to other developers as to how they might integrate the Avatar technology by sharing their expertise with yours.

We are developing a signing engine that provides automated translation from English to Signed English. Translation to American Sign Language (Which has its own linguistic rules and parameters) is much more difficult, but we are researching methods that will partially automate that, too.

Just as with translating between spoken languages, this can be partially automated, but some human intervention will always be required to provide quality translation.