Sign Together

Inspiration

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the masking mandate prevented hearing impaired individuals from reading other people's lips. This created a significant communication barrier between the hearing impaired and individuals who do not understand sign language. Our project aimed to bridge this gap by creating an educational resource that helps people learn how to read and communicate in basic sign language.

What it does

The website, signtogether.tech, houses a repository of gestures that represent the English alphabet. Here, users can study each gesture and learn how to sign the alphabet letter by letter. Once a user feels comfortable with the gestures, they can proceed to the quiz portion of the site where they'll be tested on their knowledge of the gestures. The site will track which gestures the user correctly identifies, and inform them of the gestures they should continue studying.

How we built it

We built the website using vanilla PHP, HTML, and CSS. PHP handled all of the logic in our website, from iterating through and displaying each gesture to handling the quiz and scoring function. We implemented several cookies to track which gestures the user correctly identified and which gestures they could not identify to help them improve their learning. We designed the frontend of the website using the Tailwind CSS library.

Challenges we ran into

While designing each gesture in procreate, we learned that there are several different styles of English sign language gestures depending on the region. This provided a significant challenge not only for us, who had a limited time to design images to represent each gesture, but for our users who may visit our resource from different geographic locations. Due to time constraints, we could only implement one version of the sign language English alphabet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are particularly proud of the custom gesture images we designed. While there are a number of resources already available, having granular control over how each image appears and feels is an important way to help us teach our audience, who needs to be able to view the image and both understand and replicate it in the real world.

What we learned

We learned how to deploy and utilize cookies on a website. This skill gives us a foundation for understanding functions like user sessions, which is a valuable tool for identifying users and providing them with custom-tailored information.

What's next for Sign Together

In the short term, we hope to implement sign language gestures for the different versions of the English alphabet. Eventually, we hope to add support for additional languages and common phrases like "hello", "thank you", etc.