Presentation on Aug 2015 in the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction #HCII2015 in Los Angeles, CA, USA. The paper was presented in the Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction track in the "Interaction Design for Deaf Users" session which was chaired by Dr. Areej Al-Wabil http://2015.hci.international/friday

1. Design and Development of an Educational
Arabic Sign Language Mobile Application:
Collective Impact with Tawasol
Abeer Al-Nafjan, Bayan Al-Arifi and Areej Al-Wabil,
College of Computer and Information Sciences
Software and Knowledge Engineering Research Group @HCI_Lab
King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

2. @HCI_Lab

3. Outline
• Sing Language
• Arabic Sign Language
• Tawasol Center
• Tawasol App
• Design Considerations
• Conclusion

4. Sign Language
• A language that uses a system of manual, facial,
and other body movements as the means of
communication, especially among deaf people.
(Dittmann 1978)
About 70 million deaf people 720,000 deaf

5. Sign Language
• The sign language with the most published data is
American Sign Language ASL, followed by British Sign
Language BSL and German Sign Language.
• Studies on languages such as Arabic Sign Language
and Indian/Pakistani Sign Language are just
beginning to emerge.
Sign Language & Linguistics (journal) ISSN: 1387-9316

6. Arabic Sign Language
 Results: 342
 Categories : Education,
Communication, Games
 American, British,
Japanese sign languages
 Arabic Sign language (2)
ASL
BSL
OTHERS
ArSL
Number of “Sign language” apps

7. Tawasol Center
Al-Anoud Charitable Foundation

8. Tawasol Center
Tawasol Center offers services addressing key issues facing the
deaf and hard of hearing individuals such as:
• Call center
• They provide information and referral
• Sign language training free courses
• They have social media presence
(Twitter/Instagram/YouTube) to
disseminate sign language videos.

9. Tawasol App
• Insufficient and inadequate support for Arabic-based sign
language applications was the motivation for developing
Tawasol in cooperation Tawasol Center. We use the TAWASOL
center’s created sign language videos to build a mobile
application.
• Tawasol is a free educational mobile application that is
developed in the area of assistive and educational technology
to support adults with hearing impairments.

10. Tawasol: Arabic
Sign Language App
Tawasol app contains of three
main functions:
• Dictionary
• Tutorial
• Finger-spelling

11. Dictionary
Consists of different categories
representing Arabic words.
Each category contains a
number of words.
Dictionary features:
• Search word
• Repeat
• Sound control
• Favorites

12. Tutorial
As a quiz; a player matches a
presented sign language
video to the correct word
from a list of different
words. The user has the
ability to customize the quiz
by selecting various difficulty
levels; number of presented
word options 2, 3 or 4.

13. Finger Spelling
The App will take a phrase
entered by the user and then
display the Sign Language
symbol for each letter in the
phrase. The user has the
ability to control the speed of
the spelling.

14. Design Considerations
 portable electronic devices, in this case, tablets and smart phones are
more effective than printed material, easier to learn and used at anytime
and anywhere.
 The interface is designed to adhere to accessibility and usability
guidelines, in addition to following Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines
 In order to get the advantages of the video-based system over the
textimage-based system, the signs’ videos have the following features:
– quality
– recently created in 2014
– simple background
– unified theme
– same speed

15. CONCLUSION

16. Thank you
Software and Knowledge Engineering Research Group at KSU
Website: skerg.ksu.edu.sa
Twitter: @HCI_Lab