Tag: ASL
Sign Languages Take Center Stages
At this year’s Superbowl, ASL interpreter Justina Miles stole the show.
At 20 years old, she became the first deaf woman in history to perform at the pregame and halftime shows, winning praise for her...
First Full-Time ASL Interpreters Join White House Staff
For the first time in American history, two full-time American Sign Language interpreters have joined the White House staff.
Elsie Stecker and Lindsey Snyder began working as the official White House ASL interpreters in...
CODA Brings ASL to Big Screen, Public’s Attention
The film tells the story of a mostly deaf family, focusing mainly on the sole hearing member of the family and her difficulties fitting into the hearing community—its title comes from the common acronym...
Developing Machine Translation for ASL
Though automatic translation engines like Google Translate are far from perfect, they have become useful tools to help individuals communicate, particularly for high-demand language pairs like English and Spanish. However, machine translation for...
School Districts Receive $20M in New Grants for World Languages
The Department of Defense Education Activity (DodEA) has named the recipients of nearly $20 million allocated for the inaugural World Language Advancement and Readiness grant program. These awards will allow nine public school districts,...
Virginia Launches ASL support for COVID-19 Call Center
More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals across America are still struggling with a lack of access to information on public health measures and vaccination efforts. The state of...
Deaf Community Debates Sign for ‘Joe Biden’
The Deaf community is currently debating on what exactly to sign for the U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden. Until now, the community has been spelling the name out, signing B-I-D-E-N, but many public figures, including...
ASL Pioneer Immortalized
On April 11, the U.S. Postal Service will release the16th stamp in the Distinguished Americans series, honoring Robert Panara (1920-2014), an influential teacher and a pioneer in the field of Deaf Studies. He inspired...
The Philly Sign Language Accent
About 130 of the world's estimated 6,500 languages are mutually unintelligible forms of sign language. Sign languages can be broken up into linguistic families and are not just simple translations of existing languages. For this reason...
Wearable ASL Translation Technology
Roozbeh Jafari, Associate Professor for the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University is leading the development of a tool for American Sign Language (ASL) translation. While previous attempts for automatic ASL translation have largely...