Multimedia courses generator for deaf children

In this paper, we present an environment developed in the Research Laboratory of Technologies of Information and Communication [13] of the University of Tunis to aid deaf people in improving their social integration and communication capabilities. In fact, it is proved that sign language is not innate at deaf children and therefore it needs methodic and specific training. In this context, our environment is a specialized learning content management system (LCMS) that generates multimedia courses to teach and learn sign language. According to our survey we did not find an LCMS witch can help teachers to generate courses to person with hearing disability. Moreover our tool is original in case that the sign animation is generated automatically from a textual description. The generated courses can be used either by deaf pupils to learn (or e-learn) sign language or also by hearing people to be able to communicate with deaf people. This educational environment uses mainly a web-based interpreter of sign language developed in our research laboratory and called Websign [2, 6]. It is a tool that permits to interpret automatically written texts in visualgestured-spatial language using avatar technology.