Sign Language Unification: The Need for Next Generation Deaf Education

Speech plays a basic role in communication between people, in education, in sharing ideas and in maintaining social contacts. The hearing-impaired have to challenge communication barriers in a mostly hearing-capable society. Availability of real-time speech transcription anywhere, anytime, represents a potentially life-changing opportunity for the hearing impaired to improve their communication capability. Sign Language is the most important communication way between hearing impaired community and normal persons. There are approximately three hundred Sign Languages that are used around the world today and it is considered to be the sixth largest language used worldwide. The Sign Languages are developed depending on the nation and locality of the deaf people. Since there are many different Sign Languages, it poses a difficulty for a deaf person to communicate with other deaf person from different region. The aim is to develop a Sign Language translator that eases the communication of the deaf people.