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This paper seeks to show the special needs of deaf people to have a barrier‐free access to the internet and its services and benefit from it. It aims to give explanations why deaf people need sign language on the web as a replacement for acoustic and written content and to present today's solutions to realize it.

This is a comparison and confrontation of today's research on the topic, influenced by the author's opinion.

Deaf people need sign language on the web to have full access to acoustic and written content. Sign‐language‐videos with human interpreters are today's common solution. There is a lot of research and projects with avatar‐technologies to overcome the limits of sign‐language‐videos, but the possibilities of this solution are still restricted.

This paper seeks to draw attention to the special need of deaf people, their restrictions in reading and writing and why sign language is the crucial factor to include deaf people in the information society.

This paper confronts the actual solutions of the topic and shows their advantages and limits.

The current study aims to determine the viability of the tool developed by Abbas and Sarfraz (2018) to translate English speech and text to Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) with bilingual subtitles.

Focus group interviews of 30 teachers of a Pakistani private university were conducted; who used the PSL translation tool in their classrooms for lecture delivery and communication with the deaf students.

The findings of the study determined the viability of the developed tool and showed that it is helpful in teaching deaf students efficiently. With the availability of this tool, teachers are not dependent on human sign language (SL) interpreters in their classrooms.

Overall, this tool is an effective addition to educational technology for special education. Due to the lack of Sign Language (SL) understanding, learning resources and availability of human SL interpreters in Pakistan, institutions feel dependency and scarcity to educate deaf students in a classroom. Unimpaired people and especially teachers face problems communicating with deaf people to arrange one interpreter for a student(s) in multiple classes at the same time which creates a communication gap between a teacher and a deaf student.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the Republic of Ireland’s National Emergency Coordinating Group performed with respect to ensuring access to emergency information for deaf sign language (SL) users over the course of two emergency situations in 2017 and 2018 as a result of storms. The storms book-ended parliamentary and public debate around the recognition of the indigenous SL of Ireland, Irish Sign Language (ISL). The author explores if/how increased political awareness led to better access in 2018, and how access provision maps to best practice guidelines set out by the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters (WASLI) and the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD).

This paper provides empirical insights about the asymmetrical effort that is required of a minority linguistic community, in this instance, community of deaf ISL users and their allies, to secure provision of access to emergency information that is provided as a matter of course to the wider community of hearing English language speakers. The author draws on parliamentary records, social media and print media to document the political, societal and deaf community discourse around ISL recognition and the emergencies.

The author finds that significant effort was required of deaf people and their allies to secure access to national emergency briefings in 2017, with significant improvement evidenced in 2018 for Storm Emma and the Beast from the East, in the aftermath of the adoption of the ISL Act (December 2017). The author drew on the theory of effortful engaging, which posits that unless we have greater awareness of and pro forma consideration of SLs and deaf people, the burden of work required to ensure appropriate access and participation falls on deaf people.

There is scope for completing a 360° analysis of stakeholders engaged in the process. Further work should also include interviews with deaf community members and emergency response coordinators.

This paper identifies implications for emergency coordinating groups: provision of appropriate interpreting must be a pro forma element in the planning for delivery of any emergency information. Broadcasters must be required to ensure that interpreters are visible on screen at all times during live briefings: what is unseen is “unheard” for SL users. Work remains to ensure that deaf people have access to preparatory information in their language, and that they have ease of access to two-way emergency services. Emergency coordinating teams need to integrate the UNCRPD-mapped WASLI-WFD recommendations into their emergency strategy.

Communities depend on information for their survival in times of crisis. Communication requires comprehension and interaction. For SL users, information in an indigenous SL is a lifeline in a time of crisis. This requires emergency response teams to understand that “language” is multi-modal and embed strategies for engaging with deaf communities in all aspects of their processes, with guidance from deaf community leaders and advocates. There is also a need to consider deafblind people and deaf people who have disabilities, who are more vulnerable in crisis situations.

This is the first analysis of state provision of access to information for the Irish deaf community in an emergency setting. It is one of very few empirical analyses of how deaf communities fare in emergency contexts and the first to evaluate a state’s practice vis-à-vis UNCRPD-led guidelines on best practice issued by the WASLI/WFD. The socio-political context described represents a unique period where the Irish deaf community and ISL were central to political and media discourse because of the ISL Act and the death of two deaf brothers in tragic circumstances in Autumn 2017.

In the COVID-19 era, sign language (SL) translation has gained attention in online learning, which evaluates the physical gestures of each student and bridges the communication gap between dysphonia and hearing people. The purpose of this paper is to devote the alignment between SL sequence and nature language sequence with high translation performance.

SL can be characterized as joint/bone location information in two-dimensional space over time, forming skeleton sequences. To encode joint, bone and their motion information, we propose a multistream hierarchy network (MHN) along with a vocab prediction network (VPN) and a joint network (JN) with the recurrent neural network transducer. The JN is used to concatenate the sequences encoded by the MHN and VPN and learn their sequence alignments.

We verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and provide experimental results on three large-scale datasets, which show that translation accuracy is 94.96, 54.52, and 92.88 per cent, and the inference time is 18 and 1.7 times faster than listen-attend-spell network (LAS) and visual hierarchy to lexical sequence network (H2SNet) , respectively.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework that can fuse multimodal input (i.e. joint, bone and their motion stream) and align input streams with nature language. Moreover, the provided framework is improved by the different properties of MHN, VPN and JN. Experimental results on the three datasets demonstrate that our approaches outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of translation accuracy and speed.

People with severe or profound hearing loss face daily communication problems mainly due to the language barrier between themselves and the hearing community. Their hearing deficiency, as well as their use of sign language, often makes it difficult for them to use and understand spoken language. Cyprus is amongst the top 5 European countries with a relatively high proportion of registered deaf people (0.12 per cent of the population: GUL, 2010). However, lack of technological and financial support to the Deaf Community of Cyprus leaves the Cypriot deaf people unsupported and marginalised. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This study implemented user-centred design methods to explore the communication needs and requirements of Cypriot deaf people and develop a functional prototype of a mobile app to help them to communicate more effectively with hearing people. A total of 76 deaf adults were involved in various stages of the research. This paper presents the participatory design activities (N=8) and results of usability testing (N=8).

The study found that users were completely satisfied with the mobile app and, in particular, they liked the use of Cypriot Sign Language (CSL) videos of a real person interpreting hearing people’s speech in real time and the custom onscreen keyboard to allow faster selection of text input.

Despite advances in communication aid technologies, there is currently no technology available that supports CSL or real-time speech to sign language conversion for the deaf people of Cyprus.

This paper intends to explore the levels of availability and restrictions in relation to the use of ICTs (information and communication technologies) for educating children with disabilities in Thailand's and Ethiopia's capitals.

In the course of an international research project, parents and teachers of children with different disabilities, the children themselves and further experts were interviewed about barriers and facilitators in the children's educational environment. For this paper only selected interviews focusing on sensory disabilities were analysed regarding the above mentioned areas of using ICTs.

ICTs are available in the respective cities. The levels of restrictions related to the socio‐economic situation in the two cities vary accordingly but show the same overall limitations. The intensity and kind of use of ICTs is strongly related to resources, the educational actors' awareness and knowledge.

Approaching the topic of ICTs in relation to disability might not be new, neither is the contextualisation with the Majority World. However, the combination of the three aspects against the background of current global developments (e.g. the growing gap between the poor and the rich) reveals the importance of taking a closer look at special needs education and ICTs in the Majority World. This opens the floor for discussion on how inclusion of the most marginalised groups in education affects development in general.

The recent report for the Commission of the European Communities on current multilingual activities in the field of scientific and technical information and the 1977 conference on the same theme both included substantial sections on operational and experimental machine translation systems, and in its Plan of action the Commission announced its intention to introduce an operational machine translation system into its departments and to support research projects on machine translation. This revival of interest in machine translation may well have surprised many who have tended in recent years to dismiss it as one of the ‘great failures’ of scientific research. What has changed? What grounds are there now for optimism about machine translation? Or is it still a ‘utopian dream’ ? The aim of this review is to give a general picture of present activities which may help readers to reach their own conclusions. After a sketch of the historical background and general aims (section I), it describes operational and experimental machine translation systems of recent years (section II), it continues with descriptions of interactive (man‐machine) systems and machine‐assisted translation (section III), (and it concludes with a general survey of present problems and future possibilities section IV).

According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper aims to address the issue of Indian Sign Language (ISL) sentence recognition and translation into semantically equivalent English text in a signer-independent mode.

This study presents an approach that translates ISL sentences into English text using the MobileNetV2 model and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The authors have created an ISL corpus from the Brown corpus using ISL grammar rules to perform machine translation. The authors’ approach converts ISL videos of the newly created dataset into ISL gloss sequences using the MobileNetV2 model and the recognized ISL gloss sequence is then fed to a machine translation module that generates an English sentence for each ISL sentence.

As per the experimental results, pretrained MobileNetV2 model was proven the best-suited model for the recognition of ISL sentences and NMT provided better results than Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to convert ISL text into English text. The automatic and human evaluation of the proposed approach yielded accuracies of 83.3 and 86.1%, respectively.

It can be seen that the neural machine translation systems produced translations with repetitions of other translated words, strange translations when the total number of words per sentence is increased and one or more unexpected terms that had no relation to the source text on occasion. The most common type of error is the mistranslation of places, numbers and dates. Although this has little effect on the overall structure of the translated sentence, it indicates that the embedding learned for these few words could be improved.

Sign language recognition and translation is a crucial step toward improving communication between the deaf and the rest of society. Because of the shortage of human interpreters, an alternative approach is desired to help people achieve smooth communication with the Deaf. To motivate research in this field, the authors generated an ISL corpus of 13,720 sentences and a video dataset of 47,880 ISL videos. As there is no public dataset available for ISl videos incorporating signs released by ISLRTC, the authors created a new video dataset and ISL corpus.

Vocabulary learning is a difficult task for children without hearing ability. Absence of enough learning centers and effective learning tools aggravate the problem. Modern technology can be utilized fruitfully to find solutions to the learning difficulties experienced by the deaf. The purpose of this paper is to present SiLearn – a novel technology based tool for teaching/learning sign vocabulary.

The proposed mobile application can act as a visual dictionary for deaf people. SiLearn is equipped with features that can automatically detect both text and physical objects and convert them to their corresponding signs. For testing the effectiveness of the proposed mobile application quantitative analyses were done. Quantitative analysis is based on testing a class of 28 students belonging to St Clare Oral School for the Deaf, Kerala, India. This group consisted of 17 boys and 11 girls. Analysis was also done through questionnaire. Questionnaires were given to teachers, parents of deaf students learning sign language and other sign language learners.

Results indicate that as SiLearn is very effective in sign vocabulary development. It can enhance vocabulary learning rate considerably.

This is the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques are used for early stage sign language learning. SiLearn can equally be used by children, parents and teachers for learning sign language.

This paper aims to investigate seven prominent translations of the Qur'anic verb-noun collocations into English (Pickthall, 1930; AL-Hilali and Khan, 1977; Ali, 1934; Arberry, 1955; Shakir, 1999; Sarwar, 1981; Saheeh International, 1997) to unfold their renditions of the style and meaning of such Qur'anic verb-noun collocation into English.

The study follows a corpus-based research in a sense that the study is conducted on seven translations of the Noble Qur'an that have been taken form The Qur'anic Arabic Corpus, using linguistic and exegetical analyses. Based on Reiss’ model of text analysis (2000), the author analyses the intralinguistic and extralinguistic features of the Qur'anic verb-noun collocations.

Findings reveal that linguistic and exegetical analyses are perquisites for adequate rendition, which prevent deviation in meaning and translation loss. It is also found that Qur'anic collocations use unique literary techniques and devices, which hinder their natural and adequate renditions into English.

The novelty of this study lies in studying the architectural design of the Qur'anic verb-noun collocations in terms of the unique selection of words and style. Such unique architectural design of such collocations creates monumental hindrances in their rendition into other languages, which have not been given due attention in translation studies.