Deaf Culture and Sign Language Writing System -- A Database for a New Approach to Writing System Recognition Technology

The Deaf have been denied their natural language for over a hundred years, with dire consequences for their health, citizenship and culture. Sign Language is the natural language of the Deaf, used for intellectual development and other human traits that are language related. Writing Systems (sequence of characters to represent a language) store and retrieve information for literature, science, knowledge creation, information dissemination, communication over time and space etc. Sign Writing is a writing system deemed adequate to the spatial-visual nature of Sign Languages. However, current computational technologies fail to provide the Deaf with effective tools for their writing needs (they lack usability, and/or are one-to-one translation from the oral language etc.). This article proposes a new, more natural approach: that of using screen and stylus for online handwritten recognition of Sign Writing. This research makes available a database to be used by computer vision/character recognition to inform design of Sign Writing editors.