Natural Sign Language Interfaces for Deaf Users: Rationale and Design Guidelines

This paper introduces an approach to design user interfaces for people who are deaf, which prioritizes the natural language used by a significant proportion of this community, i. e., sign language. To date, the design of most interfaces assumes that users are literate in a spoken language, such as Chinese, French, or English. Thus, interfaces rely mostly on text elements in one of those languages, in addition to graphical and other multimedia components. These interfaces pose accessibility barriers for many deaf users whose first language is one of the various existing sign languages. Our approach gives sign language visibility and considers it should be the main access means to functionality of any application intended for deaf users. Key contributions of the paper are a rationale for natural sign language interfaces and a set of related design guidelines. We illustrate the application of the proposed guidelines to the design of a prototypical environment for assisting users in translating between LSM, the official Mexican sign language, and Libras, the official Brazilian sign language.