Sign Language MMS to Make Cell Phones Accessible to the Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Community

Cell phones became extremely popular devices considering their vast utility world wide. However, making cell phones accessible to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community is still a challenge. Main available products on the market for this community offer no more than the possibility to boost/amplify volume. Many cellular provides individual cell phone models which are hearing aid compatible and possess speakerphone capabilities. However, if the user is completely deaf, these phones still tend to be somewhat complex or impossible to use. Another alternative, based on Video phones messages, are quickly widespread as the preferred method of communicating for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. However Video phones require significant computer processing power to compress and decompress video in real time. Nevertheless, this alternative still has to overcome the various technological challenges associated with utilizing video phone technology, especially via low bandwidth network. In this context, this paper describes a new application allowing the use of MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) to generate sign language animation in order to communicate with deaf people via cell phones. These animations are avatar based animation obtained by automatic interpretation of text into sign language. This application is a new component developed amongst WebSign kernel (Jemni et al., 2007; Jemni and Ellghoul, 2007).