Information on SignLink Studio

Overview

Access to Web content and interactive structures for people with disabilities has been advocated and indeed legislated for some time. However, many of the techniques used to provide access to such media for deaf and hard of hearing users involve conversion of spoken language and sounds into text. For many deaf users, who communicate primarily in sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL), print based material, such as closed captions, is experienced as a second language. In addition, sign language is the root of Deaf culture and when it is missing, there is a cultural void. This is especially true in on-line environments. Creating on-line ASL content will benefit users who prefer content in their native language and will provide for greater on-line cultural equivalency.

A crucial element of Internet is hyperlinking, which allows nonlinear navigation and connection between content pages. Hyperlinks on the Web are defined as linking points in documents or between documents on the Web identified with bold or underlined text. Users are able to browse through series of pages by accessing links located on those pages. Links can be created from most static elements, such as text and images, found on a webpage. However, time based elements such as video, animation, and sound do not normally contain hyperlinks. Without hyperlinks conneting new pages to existing ones, there is no Web, only a series of unconnected content artifacts.

Our Solution: Text and Text based links become Video and Video based Signlinks

It is important that visual-gestural languages, such as sign languages, and cultures be represented in their native form, not in a translated form. Some Web sites do provide sign language content; however, many sign language ? related sites are limited to providing sign language dictionaries or text-based information rather than signed Web content per se. If there are sign language videos used on these sites, such as SignPost BSL news headline service, they are usually surrounded by navigation mechanisms and supplemental content provided exclusively in text (e.g., English or French). Signing users must therefore continually switch between two languages - sign language and text.

The Canadian Hearing Society, the University of Toronto and Ryerson University have created SignLink Studio, an authoring tool that creates webpages by marking up sign language video files with sign language based hyperlinks called "signlinks". The software is free and can be downloaded at www.signlinkstudio.ca. SignLink Studio is a Java-based application that is designed to be easy to use by a web savvy user.

Creating a Signlink

The signlinking mechanism contains several parts, including a video indicator, a link density bar, thumbnail images, operations for linking to the referenced resource and disambiguating thumbnail image meaning, and optional text box. Each signlink is an author-defined period of time within a video clip that conveys the content of the signing Web page. When the video reaches a signlink, a link indicator is shown to notify the user.

This is similar to the blue underline commonly used to indicate text-based links. At this point, the user can click and follow the link or continue playing the content. The user can also preview or review links using a list of thumbnail images, each representing one link. Once the links and pages are finished, the author exports their work from SignLink Studio to a web ready format for direct upload to a web server.

The Gestalt

When multiple text hyperlinks appear in a page, users can scan over them in a single viewing. The overall "picture" and layout of this multi-link environment combines to enable a gestalt-type perception of the linked content on the part of the viewer. Specifically, by paying attention to the number and clustering of instances of blue underlined text and images, users can quickly come to understand whether a page is higher or lower in a site structure, what navigation tools are available and which groups of links might be thematically related. In SignLink Studio this is achieved through a density bar showing an overview of the number and clustering of links on a Webpage.

The Vision

SignLink Studio has the potential to make the world wide web more inclusive to sign language users, giving users the ability to navigate, access, and share non-text based information through the use of video and video links. Because the software is very user friendly, it can also be used to create sign language-based personal or professional websites. It can be used to add sign language content to existing text-based Web pages. Our goal is to assist governments, industry, and individuals in using SignLink Studio to create accessible Web pages and to respond to the needs of those users through improvements in the software.