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Building a Swiss German Sign Language avatar with JASigning and evaluating it among the Deaf community

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Abstract

This paper reports on the development of a system that translates German train announcements of the Swiss Federal Railways (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, SBB) into Swiss German Sign Language (Deutschschweizerische Gebärdensprache, DSGS) in real time and displays the result via an avatar. The system used to animate the avatar is called JASigning. Deliverables of the projects during which JASigning was developed are the main source of documentation for the system along with notes on the Web site. Not all planned features have been fully implemented: some because they are used very infrequently; others because there is insufficient linguistic research on which to base an implementation. The team of hearing and Deaf researchers identified the avatar functionality needed for the project and built a first version of the avatar. A focus group study with seven Deaf signers was then carried out to obtain feedback on how to further improve the avatar. This paper reports the evaluation results. It also discusses the workarounds introduced for features that were not yet directly available in the JASigning system. These features were not specific to train announcements. Hence, knowledge of how to achieve their designated effects in JASigning can be useful to persons working with other types of sign language data as well.

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Notes

  1. It is a widely recognized convention to use the upper-cased word ‘Deaf’ for describing members of the linguistic community of sign language users and, in contrast, to use the lower-cased word ‘Deaf’ when describing the audiological state of a hearing loss [16].

  2. http://vh.cmp.uea.ac.uk/index.php/JASigning.

  3. http://www.visicast.cmp.uea.ac.uk/.

  4. http://www.visicast.cmp.uea.ac.uk/eSIGN/.

  5. http://www.dictasign.eu/.

  6. Other customer service systems have been developed: For example, the TESSA system [2] and its successor VANESSA [20] translate a post office clerk’s (spoken or written) utterances into British Sign Language.

  7. To what extent DSGS is similar to German Sign Language is the subject of an ongoing study.

  8. The SBB use two different systems for this.

  9. Where possible, they used the notations available in the DSGS database of Boyes Braem [1].

  10. The mouthings used in DSGS are derived from Standard German rather than from one of the Swiss German dialects.

  11. The use of fingerspelling is relatively recent in the DSGS community. As a result, DSGS users today have a varying ability in the production and comprehension of fingerspelled words.

  12. Note that syllable and accent information has been omitted from the SAMPA notation. It is ignored by the SiGML interpreter in JASigning, as it makes little difference to the visual appearance.

  13. Apart from the \({\texttt{<mouthing\_tier\!>}}\) element shown in Fig. 4, the SiGML document type definition (DTD) permits the elements \({\texttt{<facialexpr\_tier\!>}}, {\texttt{<shoulder\_tier\!>}}, {\texttt{<body\_tier\!>}}, {\texttt{<head\_tier\!>}}, {\texttt{<eyegaze\_tier\!>}}\), and \({\texttt{<extra\_tier\!>}}\).

  14. http://vh.cmp.uea.ac.uk/index.php/ARP.

  15. The minimum version of JASigning required for this is 095k.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Sandra Sidler-Miserez for moderating the focus group and to her and Katja Tissi for their contribution to the project. They would also like to thank Penny Boyes Braem for giving valuable advice throughout this work, Thomas Hanke for sharing his expertise in different areas of sign language technology, and Richard Kennaway, Ralph Elliott, and Vince Jennings for their work on the JASigning software and avatars.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Sarah Ebling

  2. School of Computing Sciences, UEA Norwich, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

    John Glauert

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  1. Sarah Ebling
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Correspondence to Sarah Ebling.

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Ebling, S., Glauert, J. Building a Swiss German Sign Language avatar with JASigning and evaluating it among the Deaf community. Univ Access Inf Soc 15, 577–587 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-015-0408-1

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