SignMessenger: um aplicativo de conversa utilizando o sistema de escrita de sinais SignWriting

Abstract

Due to the human need for communication, social interaction, to maintain good relationship with the whole circle of friends and family, or simply entertainment, messaging applications are continuing to grow day by day. Parallel to this, more than 70 million people in the world are deaf (AHMED; SEONG, 2006), and have the sign language as their mother tongue. So, they need to communicate in a second language as we do not have a technological solution to do this in a practical and fast way. Luckily, the sign language has a written form which is the SignWriting representation, a own writing system for sign languages. In order to digitally include the Deaf, enabling him to communicate in their own mother tongue, also ensuring accessibility and equal rights, this paper proposes the development of a instant messaging application using the written representation of Sign-Writing signals. For the construction of this application, an in-depth study was needed on sign language, the SignWriting representation and the current messaging applications. From this, it was decided to develop with the Scrum methodology. Paper prototyping technique was used to attend the product’s appeal for an interface dedicated to the Deaf. Android was defined as target platform, using the IDE AndroidStudio for implementation. The final result was the SignMessenger tool, enabling conversation through signals with intuitive and fully cloud database, improving the user experience of the Deaf. Thus, this application serves the purpose of providing a way for the Deaf to communicate in their mother tongue.