National Programme of the Prevention and Control of Deafness mentioned that, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), 6.3% of the population in India has a significant hearing impairment, which affects about 63 million individuals. According to the NSSO survey, 291 people out of every 10,000 people today have severe to profound hearing loss (NSSO, 2001). The majority of these are kids, ranging in age from 0 to 14 years old. With so many young Indians who are hearing-impaired, there has been a significant decline in both physical and economic productivity.
According to Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC) we have less than 500 certified ISL interpreters, which is alarming considering the statistics of deaf population in India. There is no credible data on the number of competent ISL signers among the hearing population. The shortage of certified interpreters is due to the fact that the demand for them is very low which is due to the fact that the DHH population has not breached many barriers to be in positions which require the hiring of interpreters with attractive compensation. And the law is slowly catching up to require all broadcast news from Government channels to have live ISL interpretation. There is minuscule number of DHH individuals in mainstream colleges or even high schools and so there is no demand for interpreters in educational institutions around the country, which is the primary reason that DHH children do not make progress in acquiring high school education. Similarly, most corporate events including large conferences across disciplines do not have live interpreters with the cited reason that there are no DHH individuals in their community. Due to this lack of demand, acquiring an ISL interpreter diploma (there are many good programs in government institutions, like NISH) is not a sought-after program.
We aim to address the shortage of ISL speakers and interpreters among the hearing community by helping them learn ISL. To address the communication barrier between the deaf and the hearing we need to build automated tools for recognising ISL, as well as synthesise ISL from text. A fundamental step to achieve this objective is the collection of a large and diverse corpus of labelled continuous sign language sentences. We are collaboratively working with AI4Bharat to build an AI powered Indian Sign Language Translator, to enable easier communication between the DHH and hearing communities in work places.
We have also developed an application called Signoot! – an ISL based quiz game on Android. Our aim is to create a fun platform where the DHH community can play using their primary language. People using the application may expand their ISL vocabulary over time and also create insightful quizzes for others to play and learn. The data collected using Signoot! will be used to build more robust deep learning models for sign language translation.