signlvideo.xyz
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks a lot!
I'm sorry, but that is not a believable stat. You mean to tell me close to 1/10 of the planet is deaf and speaks ASL and doesn't read a written language?
I'm all for the project. I'm 100% in favor of increasing accessibility. I just don't believe that stat.
Are you sure it isn't 700k? That'd be more reasonable considering Wikipedia says a 1972 survey estimated the signing population as between 250k and 500k.
700M is simply ludicrous. Even if that's only taken as the number of ASL signers, that would still make ASL the third largest language in the world, ahead of Hindi and Spanish.
The rate is 5%.
OP should clean up that marketing pitch. I think it’s a good service that doesn’t have to be sold by shaming the potential customer.
And they don't all use ASL, either. Not all deaf people rely on sign language, especially if they became deaf later in life, and there are numerous other sign languages used outside the US which aren't mutually intelligible with ASL.
https://earthweb.com/sign-language-users/
"Roughly 70 million hearing-impaired and deaf people all over the globe use sign language to communicate."
While the number is clearly far too large even taking into account what I'm about to say, I think someone doesn't have to not read any written language to be excluded. For many ASL speakers, ASL, not English, is their native language. Although I read French passably, I would consider subtitles available only in French, and not in English, to be serving my needs poorly; and I think the same can be said of an ASL speaker asked to "make do" with English-language subtitles.
so presumably not just ASL. In any case, this is probably a sorely needed service, if there are robust production pipelines for subtitling and dubbing in other written languages but not for sign languages.
i assume this is coming from a place where all abilities and disabilities are equal and any kind of value judgement is immoral, so maybe you could find it useful to know that in the real world, 700 million deaf people might find it offensive that you assume they are illiterate
You don't have to be illiterate to prefer subtitles in your native language, which, for many ASL speakers, is ASL, not English.
How do people who speak with ASL communicate over long distances without video, if not text? An AMA would be appreciated.
An interesting idea would be processing subtitles to some sort of digital mannequin that makes all of the gestures. I imagine you'd do this by coding all of the sign and finding all of the appropriate mappings, a la translation.
Also, because it isn't Signed English (which is actually a thing) there is a specific grammar to it that makes it super efficient. That's why it often looks like the signer on political broadcasts isn't telling the whole story, when in fact they might even be telling more of it than text alone could convey.
I have a number of deaf friends and acquaintances (I'm almost deaf in one ear, and HoH in the other, so I have hearing aids), and I know at least from them, that written English is not their forte. A lot of grammar, like adding "ing" to the end of verbs and gerunds, is pretty baffling to someone who hasn't grown up hearing them in speech. Since I actually can hear (just not very well), my spoken/written English is not affected.
This product's offering seems to be focused on how ASL can deliver on pitch/tone/emphasis/emotion in a way transcription currently doesn't, thus "subtitles aren't sign languahe"
Visual and sign language are extremely spatial, like in Arrival / Story of Your Life. ASL is not signed one word at a time.
Automated translation is difficult, because ASL is not Signed English, it doesn't translate word for word.
Deaf people can (and usually do) learn to read and write the local language.
Deaf people were using video to communicate over long distances way before most of us were even aware that was possible. A lot of thought and engineering went into these systems, to make them responsive enough for real time communication. Unfortunately, that technology is being phased out in favor of inferior tech that works over IP. Due to the nature of the protocol, it's quite bad for real time communication -- hearing people are generally satisfied with Zoom because they're using it for audio and a low quality / high latency video feed is tolerable.
This is a preposterous claim.
To give one example, ASL puts negation and inquisition at the end of sentences. If I want to ask, "What is this?" in ASL I would point to the thing I am curious about and then sign, "What?"
The way I read their comments is that it's akin to hearing that someone learned Spanish (which has different ordering than english) as their first language and asking, "So you can't read a book?". It comes off as wildly naive, with a flavor of offensiveness that you seem to be accusing me of.
At no point did I even say whether I believe they do or whether I believe they don't have a hard time reading. I genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, don't understand how you're interpreting my words as if I'm incapable understanding that barriers exist. You're effectively implying that I'm a bigot for thinking no challenges exist, when that's not a position I've even remotely taken. Like, of course challenges exist and I'm stunned that anyone would even begin to consider that challenges wouldn't exist!
Word for word, the question I responded to is, "So deaf people can't read books?"
My question was in response to the asinine, bordering offensive, question of whether deaf people hold the intellectual capacity to learn how to read. They did not ask if it's difficult for deaf people to read, nor did they ask any question about what challenges there are. Their question was whether it's an impossibility for deaf people to read, fullstop.
Good grief..
I had a friend who grew up a hearing child of Deaf parents, with two hearing older siblings, so he learned ASL and (American) English in tandem.
By the time I knew him, he also spoke French and French Sign Language because he'd been living in France for several years, and he had fun explaining and showing us some of the differences with his Deaf French friends.
I don't want to sound judgemental, but I learned a little bit of sign language at the time, and the conversations I and friends had in sign seemed... Slangy. ASL is a language that has to deal with it's bandwidth limitations and the fact that it's not quite as broadcast as shouting is. Deaf culture involves a lot of physically reaching out and "Grabbing" the audiences attention; Tapping someone on the shoulder is an attention grabber of last resort for the hearing, while it's the obvious and only way of grabbing the attention of someone who's looking the other direction to the Deaf. Perhaps for that reason I always felt like Deaf people had no concept of personal space (Though my personal intuition is that it's actually literally about the little sounds your movement makes - I've encountered the same lack of personal space at Gun Ranges, where everyone is wearing hearing protection and you'd think that people would want to be separated)
But I learned that ASL is a language all of its own, grammar and syntax are not always the same.
In college, I learned a bit of a sign language- "C Sign" - that is actually an adaptation of English. At the time, C Sign was the thing that hearing, native English speakers were taught as a way to interact with non-hearing ASL signers. That was thirty years ago, so things might well be different now.
I don't have any direct experience, but some of my extended family are native speakers of Apache or Navajo. These are different languages, but "mutually intelligible" - speaking one can be understood if you know the other. And I traveled in Finland and Estonia - mutually intelligible (utterly impossible for me to use either of them).
I think C Sign might be more of a "pidgin": a simplification of English and ESL that is not used natively, but can be used to communicate.
So, yeah -- it's not wrong to wonder if ASL signers are using English, or are able to read it. I believe the answers to these questions are "not really" and "yes, fluently".
(Perhaps the question was posed in a blunt manner. But that's written, online communication for you -- it's an approximation of spoken interaction, and often lacking in body language or tone. So it's often taken in a way that wasn't exactly the intention... :-) Yay, Language!)
Honestly we never spelled it or wrote it down.
Source: My degree in American Sign Language.
At least part of the reason a Deaf person might have poor grammar in a spoken language is because said spoken language is almost always at least their second language.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stokoe#Sign_language_r...
Spoken languages are far more similar to each other than to sign languages.
Subtitles are like watching a movie with the green screen instead of the scenery filled in.
As a hearing person with knowledge of the language and friends in the community, you sound like an barely-informed hearing person with a capitalist-savior complex. If that isn't you, be transparent about who you are and why you're in the business.
Think about this sentence:
That's cool.
It's one of those sentences that exists only to convey a tone. Depending on tone it can mean:
* that is in fact cool
* that is in fact NOT cool
* i acknowledge that you have said something
* i agree to your suggestion
and plenty more in contexts where you only know which it means because you can hear the tone of the person.
> NO emotions
> NO accent
> NO gestures
> NO native language
This is largely counterproductive. If you are watching something visual, all of the emotions and gestures you need are already there in the video or the original presenter. The only niche this could fill are narration-driven documentaries.
With subtitles you can also do things like spell-check them or suggest edits. If a third party service sends back poor quality signing, it seems like quality control would be just as much work if not more than doing the signing yourself.
Cool product though. Would love to see even more accessibility-as-a-service type things. When I was in college I watched a visually-impaired friend try to use Ableton (at the time one of the only DAW's with a screen reader) and it was predictably painful.