Read-My-Lips: a multimedia project for the hearing impaired

Read-My-Lips is an interactive multimedia system designed to help instructors teach language and communication skills to the hearing impaired. Read-My-Lips comprises three multimedia instructional modules: Firstly Babel is an expert system able to translate text-to-speech in any language which uses the Latin alphabet. This module helps instructors teach the fine nuances of phonemes. Each phoneme has a unique sound and thus requires a precise positioning of the vocal organs which are displayed on the screen in two different projections: a front view and a profile cross view of a human face in synchronization with the output sounds of the speech synthesizer. Secondly Read & See consists of a series of hypermedia stories and games. The stories are displayed with text and full video motion. New vocabulary within the story is highlighted, so the student may select the words they want to see signed and spoken with the lips using digitized video sequences. The games reinforce the speech-reading of the new vocabulary learned. Thirdly Fingerspelling allows the student to request any word or, number to be fingerspelled