Toward an evaluation model for signing avatars

Abstract

Signing avatars can make a huge impact on the lives of deaf people by making information accessible anytime and anywhere. With technological development, sign language avatars have the potential to be the cost-effective communication solution that will remove the barriers between deaf people and the world. However, most researchers who work in this area are not part of the deaf community and to this day, the deaf community has little to no knowledge about the signing avatar technology. Thus, researchers have created and used evaluation methods that enable them to involve deaf people and take their feedback to develop and improve sign language avatars based on their needs and requirements. In the article, evaluation methods and tools used to assess signing avatars’ functionality, acceptability, and shortcomings were presented and discussed.