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Comment by thedaemon | Hacker News Reader

This looks amazing and really useful for real-time sign language translation!

It’s worth paying attention to the deaf community’s thoughts on any tech that comes along, gloves etc., for translating sign language. Short version, ASL is more than hand gestures and past efforts at solving this tend to focus more on assisting the hearing than the deaf.

This is a really good write up on the issue of signing gloves and tech: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/why-s...

Thank you for the constructive reply and the link, it will certainly be useful. It is hard for me to properly respond, when this topic (sign language machine translation) comes up. You cannot encode sign language as text! You generally cannot understand what two people are talking about informally, if you don't know them. Oh well...

My high school had a fairly large deaf program. I took Latin with a majority of the students being deaf/hearing impaired. Best part was watching the translator relay my smart-ass jokes to the other students. I’d say something and a half minute later get people grinning at me. It was a fun experience and helped prepare me for performing in other countries.

My point was that is will assist the hearing, not the deaf. So yes, this seems like it's not useful at all to the deaf community.

Real-time identification of gang affiliations doesn't seem to be too far of a leap either.

I remember learning the bloods sign in middle school, but are gang signs thrown around often that they need identifying?

Maybe this can be a pitch to MLB teams to learn the opposing team's catcher's pitch signs? If it wasn't only hands, not sure if this could offer anything to analyzing third base coach signs as well.

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