ASL Fingerspelling

Inspiration

We were inspired to create an ASL translator to assist others in being able to associate with a wider range of people. An ASL translator is an incredibly useful tool for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHOH) communities and will make a huge difference in their daily lives. By creating an informative ASL translator and website, we help bridge the communication gap between DHOH and i’m hearing communities, and make it easier for people to communicate with each other. We contribute to greater understanding and acceptance of the DHOH community, and help foster a more inclusive society.

What it does

Our ASL Assistance website involves multiple features including a translator which is very useful in communicating with someone who is DHOH. This is our main feature which allows for a user to input a word, phrase, sentence, or numbers they want to translate to ASL. In return, we will display the appropriate ASL translation on the website. In addition to this, we also provide the history of ASL (how it started off/what inspired people to create it) and the stories of famous people who were/are deaf.

How we built it

We used Java, HTML, and CSS in Visual Studio Code.

Challenges we ran into

One of the early challenges we ran into was that all of our ASL images were present on one line, with no breaks. We solved this by iterating through the input and starting a new line of images for every new word. For instance, if the input is “Hacking is awesome”, there are 3 rows of images: 1 for “Hacking”, 1 for “is”, and 1 for “awesome”. Another challenge we ran into was with navigating through the various pages, and figuring out how to format each form in order to have them all on the same line. We solved this issue by setting display to inline-block in the CSS file.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our project initially started as just an ASL translator. However, throughout the process, we expanded our product to an entire informative website based on ASL. We now have multiple subpages including a page on the history of ASL and three famous biographies about inspiring figures in addition to our translator to add to our multi-functional solution. We are also happy that we gained awareness regarding ASL in our society. Throughout this hackathon, our research led us to gain insight on the struggles the DHOH community faces as well as some new signs we can add to our ASL dictionary.

What we learned

As a group coming from various coding backgrounds (ex: HTML, Javascript, Java, Python, CSS, and Scratch) we had to figure out how to collaborate well enough to suit our various levels of expertise. We tapped into the potential of each collaborator to ensure that everyone was able to brainstorm project ideas and solutions, contribute to the code, and take part in creating the presentation. Taking our time with the idea creation process resulted in a better flow of organization and structure throughout the day because we knew what we wanted to implement and how we wanted to prioritize our ideas.

What's next for ASL Fingerspelling

A few features we hope to add to our project in the future include translating words instead of just letters, recognizing speech and translating it to ASL, and recognizing visual hand signs that can be translated to ASL as well. These implementations will require more research and coding experience that we all look forward to taking part in this upcoming summer.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• vscode