Communicator for Hearing-Impaired Persons using Pakistan Sign Language (PSL)

Abstract

Communication with a hearing-impaired individual is a big challenge for a normal person. Hearingimpaired people uses hand gesture language (sign language) to communicate with each other, which is not easy to understand by a normal person because he/she is not trained to understand sign language. This communication gap between a hearing-impaired and a normal person created big problem for hearing-impaired individuals during their shopping, hospitalization, at their schools and homes. Especially in case of emergency, it is very difficult to understand the statement of a hearing-impaired one's who uses sign language. In the last few years researchers and developers from all over the world presented different ideas and works to solve this problem but no such solution is available to resolve this issue and can create two-way communication between hearing-impaired and normal persons. This paper presented a detail description about a two-way communication system based on Pakistan Sign Language (PSL). This duplex system is developed through conversion from the text in simple English into hand gestures and vice versa. However, conversion from hand gestures is available not only in text but also with voice providing more convenience to normal person. Main objective is to facilitate a large population and making hearingimpaired persons, the vital part of our civilization. A normal person can enter the text (sentence) in application, after the checking of spelling and grammar, the text is divided into tokens and sub-tokens. A token is a gesture against each word of the text while sub-tokens are the gestures of each character of the words. The combination of tokens created the gestures of text. On the other hand when gestures were input in to the application, using image processing technique, the nature of hand gesture were recognized and converted into corresponding text or voice.

Investigating the Status of Sign Language and its Interpretation in Communication Process: A Case of School-Going Deaf Children in Pakistan

“…In Pakistan, there is a significant need for sign language interpretation services, as there is a sizeable population of deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals in the country. According to the Pakistan Sign Language Research and Development Center, there are an estimated 1.7 million people in Pakistan who are deaf or hard of hearing (Wasim, et al, 2018). Unfortunately, there is a lack of accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in many areas of Pakistani society, including education, healthcare, and employment.…”