Sign2Sign: How Businesses Can Make Innovation Accessible
July is Disability Pride Month, which is celebrating its 32nd year after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed on July 26, 1990, to prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities. This is also a time to discuss how businesses can make their online experience more accessible to people with disabilities. As they do, they might consider the innovations bubbling up from all over the world, both inside and outside the workplace. A case in point: Sign2Sign.
What is Sign2Sign?
Sign2Sign is an app that takes a creative and inclusive approach to help people learn sign language. The app is designed for family members of people who have hearing loss and hearing people. The app seeks to make it easier for hearing and hard-of-hearing people to communicate.
The app is the brainchild of Anastasia Patricks, a student at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She was inspired by Orange Days, a drama series in Japan in which a character with hearing loss communicates with sign language. She wanted to learn sign language to communicate with people who are deaf or have experienced hearing loss. She soon discovered that two of her friends, Richardson Qiu and Steven Rachman – shared her interest.
In a world that increasingly uses mobile devices, they looked for an app that they could learn from. But they were stymied. Most lacked interactive features, and they were not terribly effective at teaching. For instance, apps usually taught people to finger spell and sign words or full sentences; however, they did not allow users to practice sign language in a conversational manner. Imagine learning any new language without being able to practice it in a conversational way!
So, they decided to create one themselves: Sign2Sign.
The genius of Sign2Sign
Like any good product development team, Team Sign2Sign did their user-based homework first. They learned from the Singapore Association for the Deaf that its families of people with learning disabilities are an underserved market. Many have simply not learned sign language, which creates a communications gap with their loved ones.
The three-person team went about designing Sign2Sign to bridge that gap. How? By using a 3D avatar to demonstrate signs to help people learn signing vocabulary and, crucially, practice it in conversation. The app provides real-time feedback to users in order to improve their two-way signing by watching themselves practice.
Artificial intelligence (including Microsoft Azure Machine Learning) plays a crucial role as the app learns sign language and teaches itself how to teach others. But AI does not learn by itself: it must be trained with data. The team needed to manually generate their own data to increase the number of samples and variation of each sign. This helped improve the accuracy of the app.
The team entered Sign2Sign in Microsoft’s annual Imagine Cup, in which 2 million+ students from 160 countries compete for prizes including training, mentorship, technology, publicity, and cash. And Team Sign2Sign won for the Lifestyle category!
Lessons learned
There are several lessons to learn from Sign2Sign:
- Ingenuity can come from anywhere. Microsoft has figured out how to tap into grassroots ideas through a competition that rewards breakthrough thinking.
- The metaverse – an emerging world in which people communicate through avatars – can be a source of social good. Imagine how Sign2Sign might flourish if adopted in a metaverse environment such as Fortnite!
- It’s important to share success stories as Microsoft is doing by drawing attention to Imagine Cup winners through a dedicated website.
Consider the sources of innovation in and outside your company. How might you harness emerging ideas to make the world more inclusive?
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