الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 88 |  |  |
| | | from | 88 | | |
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.