There are over 70 million deaf people in the world. Although there are 121 sign languages, these are rarely learned by the people concerned, and even less by people without this disability. When we ask the people concerned why, it's for two main reasons:
- A lack of education about it
- A lack of usefulness, because few people can understand them.
Although I can't help people learn sign language, I want to help people who can speak it by enabling them to communicate with as many people as possible.
How can I do this? My idea is to design an application that translates sign language into a natural language, like Google Translate. I know that there's a company called SignAll, that has partially implemented my project. But this company works more in B2B and requires a certain amount of hardware, whereas my idea would be to make it in the form of a mobile application to democratize this.
My aim for the very first version would be to translate ASL, the American Sign Language, the most widely signed in the world with almost half a million signers, into English.
English conversion to other world languages would then follow.
And if I ever have the skills and knowledge to, allow users to have lessons to learn sign language. That's why I got in touch with deaf and dumb associations who seemed interested in the idea.