Initiatives like StorySign should be many, many more. Especially if they aim to help disadvantaged groups or groups with disabilities, such as teaching sign language and reading to deaf children.
Today there are more than 32 million deaf people around the world. Many of them do not have access to sign language in the key stages of early learning, and they face great problems learning to read due to the difficulty of relating words and sounds. According to the European Union of the Deaf, 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents and 51% of parents of deaf children in Spain have little or no knowledge of sign language , which makes it difficult to the little ones learn the language and start reading.
I don’t know how many deaf children there are in Spain, or deaf parents, or not, who have young and not so young children with this hearing disability. Can you imagine those parents, especially if they are also deaf, trying to teach their hearing-impaired children to learn to read? No, you can’t imagine it. How do these little ones learn to communicate, to enrich their knowledge or to unravel the keys to their concerns? Put yourself in their shoes for a minute and you will be able to feel or empathize with people who have this disability and who, nevertheless, are able to move forward and become Ludwig Van Betthoven, Thomas Edison or Marlee Matlin.
Concha Díaz, president of the State Confederation of Deaf People and its Foundation, says: “ Sign language facilitates literacy, the learning of reading and writing for deaf girls and boys, which allows the acquisition of knowledge, encourages curiosity, imagination, helps to grow as people and feeds the critical spirit. Combining sign language and reading ensures that these children have access to information, communication and, in turn, believe it. All this has an important impact on the school, on their future work and on their personal autonomy ”.
To help this group of people with disabilities in a small but relevant part, StorySign was born a year ago, an initiative of a Chinese company, yes Huawei, which aims to raise awareness about the literacy difficulties of the deaf community and help the deaf community. children who have this problem learn to read. A project that twelve months later has been expanded and developed, among others thanks to technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) and that is available in up to fourteen sign languages from around the world , including the language of American signs.
StorySign is an application that can be downloaded for free on both Android and IOS smartphones. It has five books that help to learn sign language, and to read to deaf children thanks to the power of artificial intelligence and augmented reality. The application translates the content of compatible children’s stories in real time, creating an authentic reading experience for deaf children and their families. The stories come to life with Star, a charming avatar, developed in collaboration with world-class studio Aardman, which translates a variety of popular children’s books into sign language in real time.
Ten minutes to bed, little monster , There is a dragon in your book and Good night, Spot are the titles in Spanish Sign Language (LSE) that have just been added to the StorySign library, and that already had two more : Where is Spot? and Ten minutes to bed, little Unicorn.
How does StorySign work? Once the application is downloaded, either from the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store or the Huawei App Gallery, the child opens the book that he chooses from those mentioned above, and then opens the application and holds the phone over the page; then Star, the avatar, interprets the story on the smartphone in sign language, while the application highlights each word it interprets.
I do not know if with StorySign new figures of the Arts, music, literature, or cinema will be born, such as those mentioned, but I am sure that they will help people with this disability to be able to relate more normally with the rest of the community. Society.
