I can't wait for someone to make a sign language browser interface out of this. I'm sure things like that have been done with desktop accessibility apps, but embedding it into a web page or browser plugin would be amazing.
Please correct my understanding here if I'm wrong, but if a user was able to use sign language wouldn't they be able to type? What accessibility improvement are you envisioning?
I don't know sign language, but I can imagine that for some people typing might be much slower than using sign language.
Fluent sign language is much faster than typing. I think it's about the same speed as spoken word, so you'd get the same benefits as normal speech recognition.
It could also be useful in cases where you don't have a physical keyboard (mobile, for example, where you do have a camera...).
Learning sign language
exactly what I thought
My friends and I worked on this problem for a hackathon and even managed to get 3 letters that could be recognized! The judges were unimpressed and the win went to a group that copied a project off of instructables.com :)
If you'll suffer a shameless plug, a friend and I made an (imperfect) ASL learning project at TAMUHack one year. If you're interested: