by Emanuele Chiusaroli and Laura De Negri.
LIS, Italian Sign Language, is a complete language with its own grammar, syntax and lexicon. LIS was produced by the Deaf community, has different origins, and represents a very rich cultural and linguistic heritage. Sign Languages have ancient roots and developed separately from spoken languages: they have always existed, traces can be found in Spanish and French writings and confirmation of this assertion can be found in the United States with William Stokoe.
In Italy, its diffusion is linked to the history of the Deaf community (ref. Virginia Volterra), through special deaf institutes and families, education, institutions and associations (Ente Nazionale dei Sordi, Europe Union Deaf, World Federation Deaf), and thanks to the battles for the recognition of human and linguistic rights of Deaf people starting from the Declaration of Human Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
LIS is composed of eight manual and non-manual parameters:
- configuration: a shape assumed by one or two hands
- movement: dynamic execution of a configuration
- place: space where the sign is performed
- orientation: dependent on the palm of the hand
- gaze: visual and/or local references
- facial expression: composed of impersonations and tones
- labialization: divided into images of borrowed words and special oral compositions
- torso posture: to indicate conceptual and temporal spaces
A living language
LIS is a visually fascinating language allowing full understanding to anyone who learns it, with the same possibility of responding “conceptually”: in fact, the expressive and fluid signs are both iconic and systematic or arbitrary.
Supporting the promotion of sign language is important for the Deaf in order to promote the development of a more inclusive and accessible society for all, including hearing people. In fact, it would allow them an expressive flexibility also based on conceptual schemes rather than on single words: LIS gives the possibility of grasping in depth the details and emotional states contained in speech or narration. Behind this language, there is also the Deaf Community which uses and promotes it, for the rights of communication and inclusive citizenship, and the Deaf Culture which reflects the values and traditions in common between them, recalling many sociological aspects of “Deafhood” which, according to the definition of Paddy Ladd , can be defined as “the state of being deaf”, consciously deaf, recognized even from outside.
Often, LIS knowledge and daily use are perceived as a poor Italian knowledge or as the difficulty of communicating with a hearing person: actually, information is communicated and perceived visually through Sign Language, allowing for a more immediate conceptual understanding. Compared to Italian, which is a “sequential” spoken language, sign language is instead a multimodal channel that makes communication expressive and receptive through the natural modes of visual expression.
The ideal model of “accessibility” for deaf people varies from person to person: LIS/Italian interpretation services, subtitling and transcriptions, more inclusive websites and awareness courses aimed at everyone but especially at hearing people. On the accessibility front in recent years, significant progress has been made but there is still a lot to do, if we consider that LIS was recognized as an official language of the Italian Republic only in 2021 and qualified LIS personnel (LIS interpreters, communication assistants and educators) are still lacking both in the private sector and in the Public Administration, where legislation imposes legal obligations of “physical, sensorial and digital” accessibility for all services aimed at the public and towards all citizens, in particular for the most vulnerable categories.
In the vast majority of situations of service providing to citizens/users, both on the private front (Banks, Post Offices, commercial establishments) and on the PA front, there is a total lack of adequate solutions for communicating with a deaf person, and even fewer are there LIS interpretation services, despite national, European and international recommendations; this situation does not allow the full autonomy of the deaf citizen/user in using services for themselves and more generally in their relationship with the “world” of hearing people.
Handy Signs, the LIS assistant at your fingertips
In this context, Handy Signs has been made available. It is the first digital app that translates LIS into written and spoken Italian thanks to Artificial Intelligence, improving the accessibility to services for deaf citizens and facilitating communication between deaf and hearing people.
The idea for Handy Signs was born more than ten years ago when Emanuele Chiusaroli co-founded E-lisir, one of the first startups providing online LIS video-interpreting services. Thanks to that experience, Emanuele came into contact with the Deaf community of Rome and began to be passionate about the themes of Sign Language and visual communication: the almost “visionary” intuition, for the state of technology in 2014, consist of creating an accessibility service to LIS not through “human” interpreters but through Artificial Intelligence. Then in 2019, the meeting with Laura De Negri, Flavio Marsili and Giuseppe Soccodato gave a new impetus to the project and with the progress of AI in the field of image recognition/computer vision, it was possible to create the first prototype and validate the technological feasibility of the solution.
The “Handy Signs User eXperience” was designed with the help of the deaf community itself: in short, when a deaf person “speaks using LIS signs” in LIS in front of the camera of a phone or tablet, the application recognizes the signs and translates them in real time into Italian via subtitles on the display and “voice” reproduced by the speaker. Handy Signs “speaks” for the deaf person. Vice versa, when the hearing person speaks, the dialogue is transcribed into subtitles on the display, in this way, the app creates a more inclusive and immediate two-way communication, putting both the deaf person and the hearing interlocutor in their comfort zone.
Handy Signs is on market as SaaS for Companies and Public Administrations that intend to improve the accessibility and inclusivity of their services and by 2025 it will be available for everyone, deaf and hearing people as an App on the main digital stores and on the website www.handysigns.it. The first interested organizations were banks, for the accessibility of financial advice, and Healthcare to facilitate understanding between the doctor and the deaf patient; immediately after, an interest in the application emerged in the museum and cultural sector in order to make more accessible ticketing and reception services and, above all, to improve the comprehension of explanations by deaf visitors and facilitate communication with museum educators and tourist guides.
No one left behind
And what does the future hold? It seems rhetorical arguing that the best is yet to come, but for a moment let’s look at some objective facts, at least on three dimensions: legislation, sustainability and technology.
Following the recognition of LIS in 2021, new regulations have been promulgated (including the DL-Legislative Decree no. 222 of 12/13/2023) with the aim to implement the rights to accessibility and inclusion for all categories of citizens, not just the disabled.
On the sustainability front, the SFDR “Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation” is a milestone for the integration of ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) objectives within the Company Sustainability Balance sheets and it is destined progressively to extend from public entities to all companies.
Finally, as regards Artificial Intelligence, after the inevitable enthusiasm for the enormous opportunities offered by Large Language Models (LLM or Transformer as chatGPT), and perhaps also thanks to the knock-on effect created by those technologies, new more “vertical” Machine Learning models are gaining ground, focused on specific use cases and based on certified and reliable data, collected and processed in compliance with EU data protection rules.
Putting these three macro-trends together, we can be optimistic about a future in which technology will be at the service of human beings, and not vice versa, building an increasingly accessible and inclusive society where, finally, no one is left behind.