• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.265-270
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• 2014

Hearing-impaired people have difficulty in hearing, so it is also hard for them to learn letters that represent sound and text that conveys complex and abstract concepts. Therefore it has been natural choice for the hearing-impaired people to use sign language for communication, which employes facial expression, and hands and body motion. However, the major communication methods in daily life are text and speech, which are big obstacles for the hearing-impaired people to access information, to learn and make intellectual activities, and to get jobs. As delivering information via internet become common the hearing-impaired people are experiencing more difficulty in accessing information since internet represents information mostly in text forms. This intensifies unbalance of information accessibility. This paper reports web-based text-to-sign language translating system that helps web designer to use sign language in web page design. Since the system is web-based, if web designers are equipped with common computing environment for internet browsing, they can use the system. The web-based text-to-sign language system takes the format of bulletin board as user interface. When web designers write paragraphs and post them through the bulletin board to the translating server, the server translates the incoming text to sign language, animates with 3D avatar and records the animation in a MP4 file. The file addresses are fetched by the bulletin board and it enables web designers embed the translated sign language file into their web pages by using HTML5 or Javascript. Also we analyzed text used by web pages of public services, then figured out new words to the translating system, and added to improve translation. This addition is expected to encourage wide and easy acceptance of web pages for hearing-impaired people to public services.