Stories for Everyone using American Sign Language

What if people in a foreign location want to find the ASL version of their local stories. My website allows users to upload ASL videos and can also translate texts to English and to ASL.

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Inspiration

While _ American Sign Language _ (ASL) interpreters may be common in more developed countries, certain countries may not have a lot of interpreters. In India, there are only about 300 certified instructors, translating for a deaf population of between 1.8 million and 7 million (the range may vary as the Indian census does not track the number of deaf people). There may be groups like schools and classes that want to incorporate ASL but do not have access to the people or can not afford to do so.

This inspired us to build a website that in addition to showing the ASL translations of words, we show the ASL translations of whole texts. With the help of videos that are uploaded by the users.

What it does

Upload

Users are able to upload videos along with the title which then gets stored to a media directory.

Translate

The translate page uses the titles which were uploaded by the users, to pull the video from the directory and display it, while translating the text entered by the user at the same time.

How we built it

The website was built using a Django framework. The video files uploaded by the user gets stored into the Media directory where it is pulled from later on. The MyMemory API is used to translate the text that the user has input into English. And along with that the title that was previously uploaded by the user is matched with the input text to get the ASL translation of it.

Challenges we ran into

  • Trying to use variables from one view to another view.
  • Retrieving the URL link of the video uploaded.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Learning how to accept a video file from the user and then saving it to a directory on the local machine.
  • Finding an API that did not have a character limit, so that we could input large chunks of texts.

What's next for Stories for Everyone using American Sign Language

  • Stories for Everyone needs to incorporate a Log In options so that only verified users can upload videos.
  • By creating a payment system where users pay to access the videos, we can incentivise users with money to upload more videos.
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