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Abstract People with special-needs face a variety of different challenges and barriers that isolate them from their surroundings. Focusing on the deaf persons as a main kind of special-needs persons, the only way to communicate in a deaf community is the use of Sign Language. In fact, for deaf individuals, Sign Language is the main communication barrier with hearing people; either one side needs to learn the language of the other or they have to depend on a thirdparty interpreter. Nowadays, several assistive technologies have been developed to reduce many of these barriers and simplify the communication between special-needs persons and the surrounding environment. However, few frameworks are presented to support them in the Arabic region either due to the lack of resources or the complexity of the Arabic language. Despite the efforts of many organizations and governments, deaf people still forming a closed community isolated from the public society. With technological advances, there have been many attempts to build a feasible bridge to connect deaf communities with the public. However, most of the developed techniques are complex and need special and expensive equipment which is not affordable for deaf people, especially in Arabic countries where deaf represents a significant proportion of the population mostly of medium and poor classes. This thesis introduced a mobile-based framework that will help Arabic deaf people to communicate ’on the go’ easily with virtually any one without the 3 Guides and tutorials 4 need of any specific devices or support from other people. The framework utilizes the power of Cloud Computing for the complex processing of the Arabic text. The implementation process was divided to two directions. First, build a part of framework which responsible for converting Arabic speech to Arabic sign language ( ArSL). The speech processing produced a cartoon avatar showing the corresponding Egyptian Arabic Sign Language on the mobile handset of the deaf person. Secondly, converting ArSL to Arabic Speech, a live video streaming hand sign recognition approach is implemented, the obstacles and challenging issue at this point lead us to find another solution for the second part of frame work. Fortunately, mobile devices reached all hands recently creating a good opportunity to build a simple visible solution. Thus, we have developed an Android mobile application to support the Arabic Sign Language. Inspired by Chinese keyboards, we have embedded the language signs as a font to build a user-friendly keyboard. It helps a deaf person to construct Arabic Sign Language sentences and asks the application to convert them into standard Arabic text and speech. Moreover, the application works the other way around and translates from standard Arabic to Arabic Sign Language forming a simple mechanism for seamless communications between hearing and deaf people. Finally, The proposed solution was tested by using a number of volunteers from deaf and hearing communities and the results were promising. |