Application for Iraqi sign language translation on Android system

Deaf people suffer from difficulty in social communication, especially those who have been denied the blessing of hearing before the acquisition of spoken language and before learning to read and write. For the purpose of employing mobile devices for the benefit of these people, their teachers and everyone who has contact with them, this research aims to design an application for social communication and learning by translating Iraqi sign language into text in Arabic and vice versa. Iraqi sign language has been chosen because of a lack of applications for this field. The current research, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in Iraq. The application is open source; words that are not found in the application database can be processed by translating them into letters alphabetically. The importance of the application lies in the fact that it is a means of communication and e-learning through Iraqi sign language, reading and writing in Arabic. Similarly, it is regarded as a means of social communication between deaf people and those with normal hearing. This application is designed by using JAVA language and it was tested on several deaf students at Al-Amal Institute for Special Needs Care in Mosul, Iraq. It was well comprehended and accepted

The Glass Ceiling and Persons With Disabilities

Glass Ceiling ReportGlassCeilingBackground2PersonsWithDisabilities.pdf: 8336 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Sign Language Recognition using Machine Learning

Deaf and dumb people communicate with others and within their own groups by using sign language. Beginning with the acquisition of sign gestures, computer recognition of sign language continues until text or speech is produced. There are two types of sign gestures: static and dynamic. Both gesture recognition systems, though static gesture recognition is easier to use than dynamic gesture recognition, are crucial to the human race. In this survey, the steps for sign language recognition are detailed. Examined are the data collection, preprocessing, transformation, feature extraction, classification, and outcomes. There were also some recommendations for furthering this field of study

Employee Medical Exams and Disability-Related Inquiries under the ADA: Guidance for Employers Regarding Current Employees

This brochure is one of a series on human resources practices and workplace accommodations for persons with disabilities edited by Susanne M. Bruyère, Ph.D., CRC, Director, Employment and Disability Institute, Cornell University ILR School. This brochure was written by Susanne Bruyère in July, 2001. It was further updated in 2011 by Beth Reiter, an independent legal consultant, Ithaca, N.Y., with assistance from Sara Furguson, a Cornell University Employment and Disability Institute student research assistant. These updates, and the development of new brochures, were funded by Cornell, the National ADA Center Network, and other supporters

Parametric synthesis of sign language

The isolation of the deaf community from mainstream society is in part due to the lack of knowledge most hearing people have of sign language. To most, there seems to be little need to learn a language that is spoken by such a small minority unless perhaps a relative is unable to hear. Even with a desire to learn, the task may seem insurmountable due to the unique formational and grammatical rules of the language. This linguistic rift has led to the call for an automatic translation system with the ability to take voice or written text as input and produce a comprehensive sequence of signed gestures through computing. This thesis focused on the development of the foundation of a system that would receive English language input and generate a sequence of related signed gestures each synthesized from their basic kinematic parameters. A technique of sign specification for a computer-based translation system was developed through the use of Python objects and functions. Sign definitions, written as Python algorithms, were used to drive the simulation engine of a human-modeling software known as Jack. This research suggests that 3-dimensional computer graphics can be utilized in the production of sign representations that are intelligible and natural in appearance

Job and Work Analysis Guidelines on Identifying Jobs for Persons With Disabilities

[From Preface] As people with disabilities enter in greater numbers into competitive employment, it has become clear that they can be excellent employees, an asset to their employers, if they work in jobs matched to their skills, abilities and interests. Many employers of disabled persons are testifying to this all round the world. Other employers are willing to recruit disabled workers, but need support in this, as they may be unsure of what jobs to offer. Job and work analysis can be useful in identifying suitable jobs within the enterprise, and adjustments and accommodations which may need to be carried out, and in making it easier to match the skills and abilities of the disabled job seeker with the requirements of the job

The Racist Algorithm?

Review of The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Foreign Language Learning Experiences of Deaf and Severely Hard-of-Hearing Czech University Students

This paper presents qualitative research on the experiences and opinions of four Czech native speakers learning English as a second language all of whom are either deaf or severely hard-of-hearing and are currently pursuing or have recently finished university studies in the Czech Republic. Within the framework of an international project, the two male and two female respondents were interviewed individually in order to get an insider’s perspective on the needs, difficulties and preferred teaching and learning strategies of students with hearing loss. The descriptive-interpretative analysis of the data followed the principles of qualitative research and yielded four main themes: learning experience, motivation, teaching modality, and learning strategies and learner autonomy. The results highlight the importance of learning experience gained in primary and secondary education and the need for teachers who provide positive motivation for deaf learners and are fluent users of Czech Sign Language. The findings can enrich the knowledge of language teachers, teacher trainers as well as language policy makers and are transferable to similar contextsPředkládaná studie popisuje kvalitativní výzkum, jehož cílem bylo získat vhled do zkušeností a názorů čtyř českých neslyšících či těžce sluchově postižených vysokoškolských studentů či absolventů s učením se anglickému jazyku. V rámci mezinárodního projektu byly se dvěma ženami a dvěma muži provedeny rozhovory, které poskytují osobní pohled na potřeby, problémy a preferované výukové a učební strategie studentů se ztrátou sluchu. Na základě deskriptivně-interpretační analýzy dat provedené dle principů kvalitativního výzkumu byla identifikována čtyři hlavní témata: Zkušenosti s učením, Motivace, Jazyková modalita výuky a Učební strategie a autonomie. Výsledky výzkumu ukazují na význam zkušeností s výukou a učením se získaných na základní a střední škole a potřebnost učitelů, kteří důvěřují schopnostem neslyšících studentů a dokáží používat český znakový jazyk. Zjištěn mohou být přínosná pro učitele jazyků a jejich odbornou přípravu stejně jako pro tvůrce vzdělávací politiky a jsou přenositelná pro podobné kontexty

Improving Deaf Accessibility to Web-based Multimedia

Internet technologies have expanded rapidly over the past two decades, making information of all sorts more readily available. Not only are they more cost-effective than traditional media, these new media have contributed to quality and convenience. However, proliferation of video and audio media on the internet creates an inadvertent disadvantage for deaf Internet users. Despite technological and legislative milestones in recent decades in making television and movies more accessible, there has been little progress with online access. A major obstacle to providing captions for internet media is the high cost of captioning and transcribing services. To respond to this problem, a possible solution lies in automatic speech recognition (ASR). This research investigates possible solutions to Web accessibility through utilization of ASR technologies. It surveys previous studies that employ visualization and ASR to determine their effectiveness in the context of deaf accessibility. Since there was no existing literature indicating the area of greatest need, a preliminary study identified an application that would serve as a case study for applying and evaluating speech visualization technology. A total of 20 deaf and hard-of-hearing participants were interviewed via video phone and their responses in American Sign Language were transcribed to English. The most common theme was concern over a lack of accessibility for online news. The second study evaluated different presentation strategies for making online news videos more accessible. A total of 95 participants viewed four different caption styles. Each style was presented on different news stories with control for content level and delivery. In addition to pre-test and post-test questionnaires, both performance and preference measures were conducted. Results from the study offer emphatic support for the hypothesis that captioning the online videos makes the Internet more accessible to the deaf users. Furthermore, the findings lend strong evidence to the idea of utilizing automatic captions to make videos comprehensible to the deaf viewers at a fraction of the cost. The color-coded captions that used highlighting to reflect the accuracy ratings were found neither to be beneficial nor detrimental; however, when asked directly about the benefit of color-coding there was support for the concept. Further development and research will be necessary to find the appropriate solution

Medium access control in wireless network-on-chip: a context analysis

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Wireless on-chip communication is a promising candidate to address the performance and efficiency issues that arise when scaling current NoC techniques to manycore processors. A WNoC can serve global and broadcast traffic with ultra-low latency even in thousand-core chips, thus acting as a natural complement to conventional and throughput-oriented wireline NoCs. However, the development of MAC strategies needed to efficiently share the wireless medium among the increasing number of cores remains a considerable challenge given the singularities of the environment and the novelty of the research area. In this position article, we present a context analysis describing the physical constraints, performance objectives, and traffic characteristics of the on-chip communication paradigm. We summarize the main differences with respect to traditional wireless scenarios, and then discuss their implications on the design of MAC protocols for manycore WNoC, with the ultimate goal of kickstarting this arguably unexplored research area.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft