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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.

Learning sign language

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:

https://github.com/ssaamm/sign-language-tutor

We thought about LeapMotion but went with a CV implementation instead. Very cool project!

exactly what I thought

It could also be useful in cases where you don't have a physical keyboard (mobile, for example, where you do have a camera...).

I don't know sign language, but I can imagine that for some people typing might be much slower than using sign language.