BiBiKit - A Bilingual Bimodal Reading and Writing Tool for Sign Language Users

Sign language is used by many people who were born deaf or who became deaf early in life as their first and/or preferred language. There is no writing system for sign languages; texts are signed on video. As a consequence, texts in sign language are hard to navigate, search and annotate. The BiBiKit project is an easy to use authoring kit which is being developed and enables students, teachers, and virtually everyone to write and read bilingual bimodal texts and thereby creating electronic productions, which link text to sign language video. The main purpose of the project is to develop software that enables the user to link text to video, at the word, phrase and/or sentence level. The software will be developed for sign language and vice versa, but can be used to easily link text to any video: e.g. to add annotations, captions, or navigation points. The three guiding principles are: Software that is 1) stable, 2) easy to use, and 3) foolproof. A web based platform will be developed so the software is available whenever and wherever.