Empowering the Text-based Understandability of Students with Hearing Impairments

Language is the key to satisfy the human need to impart and exchange information. General people communicate using their vocal tones and the hearing ability [1]. But the people with hearing impairments who use Sign Language are not able to understand by reading text. Hence, we come up with an IT-based solution to this lack of text - based understandability and evaluate the success of that solution. Previous researches conducted have proposed solutions to convert text into Sign language and this study evaluates a 3D avatar-based conversion of Sinhala text to Sinhala Sign Language. A sample of 08 students of Grade 07 of Matara, Rohana Special School grouped into a control group and an experimental group where the experimental group used the IT-based solution and the control group used the normal method for answering a written examination paper created for the subject Buddhism. Initially, the control group got an average mark which is higher than the average mark of the experimental group. But, when the student marks were compared with the previous test marks the control group had an average decrease of 30.15% marks and the experimental group had an average decrease of only 19.3% marks suggesting that a computational solution can increase the text-based understandability of hearin- impaired students.