Development of a legible deaf-signing virtual human

Abstract

Many deaf people rely on sign language as their primary mode of communication. They will enjoy enhanced information access if media applications can provide signed commentaries. The advent of multimedia makes such provision possible. We outline a prototype real time subtitle-to-signing translation system, based on the adaptation and integration of existing software components. We describe the development of a framework, using the Tcl/Tk environment, that supports the integration of distributed system components using a basic communications infrastructure. We discuss the development of a virtual human (avatar), deployed in this framework, to perform the signing.