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No, of course not :). I was thinking more along the lines of a deaf-mute person being able to give a presentation or hold a lecture for people that do not understand sign language.


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I always wondered if a deaf or mute person could challenge the same rules that allowed incomprehensible people to lecture.

Sure if you believe it. We also don't speak to each other to cater to people who are deaf, and we don't use sign language to cater to people who are blind.

This may be a dumb question, but could it be to help deaf people who know sign language but can't read/write?

I'm not sure we understand each other. If the signing person can speak to employers etc. now via the device, they can only speak back with their mouths, or possibly speech recognition if well set up. The deaf person would have to be able to lip-read people who potentially don't know how to help them in that area. In other words, it might still be tricky to communicate.

I think it’s more useful at the opposite - introducing non-deaf people to sign language. It’s pretty neat as long as it’s unobtrusive.

On that topic I've always wondered about official presentations where the program splits the screen between the actual speaker and a person signing.

Seems like that would only be useful for deaf people actually at the event whereas deaf people could be better served by captions.


You don't need to be deaf to communicate with deaf people, right? You could learn sign language either way.

Not necessarily. Deaf people can read, even ones who are deaf from birth.

This is kind of unrelated, but I wonder if a small amount (say 100 signs or so) of sign language (ASL or local equivalent) wouldn't be useful for hearing people in their day-to-day lives. I'm very interested in sign-language, but language being what it is you can't do it alone ...

Yes and there's also a similar service where a signing person can video chat to a sign language interpreter who voice calls the hearing person while signing in the video chat. Proficient signers are very high bandwidth.

Yes, someone who isn't deaf. "Hearing" or "hearing person" is the vernacular used in the deaf community. It can be important to establish depending on the context. In this case I wanted to make it clear that I was learning ASL despite not being deaf.

It's not. And I'd really like to know if many deaf folks would really feel like this properly serves their interests.

You think if you make it a less commercially viable skill and make it easier to communicate with deaf people without learning it, more people will learn it? Or even the same number of people?

my father is deaf and mute, particularly the Pakistani sign language, one particular utility i see this can be really useful for is if the model can be trained on detecting different sign languages, then it would become possible for live translation to happen and in a distant future all people like my dad can talk with each other beyond their small communities. I don't think something like that exists.

Yes - I knew someone who was deaf and mute, and he was an eager user because it became so easy to communicate in writing.

How would ANY other non-speaker do it? Presumably there are plenty of deaf PhD's about who have never, nor have the ability, to speak.

I'm not deaf and/or use sign language, but I have modes where I prefer speaking rather than written text. I would presume deaf people would be the same for their more personal and expressive communication.

Even though this isn't going to be useful for interacting with deaf community, if you can turn gestures into words easily, I feel military might be interested. Also possibly divers, and other people working in conditions where they can't or shouldn't speak.

This is really brilliant. I wonder if there is an opportunity to do something with this tech stack and sign language? That would be very cool.
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