I don't know how the situation is in the USA but where I come from (Portugal) there aren't many lectures, conferences and classes for the deaf community.
To help fighting this problem I and a group of friends are trying to create a product. We want to develop a software that would either:
a) Automatically transform speech to text which would appear on screen (like subtitles for a foreign movie).
or
b) Automatically transform speech to text to sign language using a computer animated avatar that would also appear in screen (imagine like this but adapted to power point apresentations).
This would make possible to the deaf community to understand lectures given by people who don't know sign language. As you can imagine, software b) would be harder to make so we will only follow that path if it's worth it. So my question is: Would your experience be better with the sign language avatar instead of only text?
To help fighting this problem I and a group of friends are trying to create a product. We want to develop a software that would either:
a) Automatically transform speech to text which would appear on screen (like subtitles for a foreign movie).
or
b) Automatically transform speech to text to sign language using a computer animated avatar that would also appear in screen (imagine like this but adapted to power point apresentations).
This would make possible to the deaf community to understand lectures given by people who don't know sign language. As you can imagine, software b) would be harder to make so we will only follow that path if it's worth it. So my question is: Would your experience be better with the sign language avatar instead of only text?