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Persons with disabilities are often marginalised from economy and society due to the lack of access to disability related information and services. Through the use of assistive technologies access to the information and services can often be obtained e.g. a visually impaired user using a screen reader. The Deaf however, cannot use such technology to break the barrier because of differences in literacy and comfort with written material. The Deaf thus requires another intervention to improve their access to information and services. One such mechanism is by embedding animated Sign Language in Web pages. This paper analyses the effectiveness and appropriateness of using this approach by embedding South African Sign Language in the South African National Accessibility Portal. Through experiments, user evaluations and web-metrics it is found that such techniques can improve the accessibility for Deaf users in experimental conditions. However, real world pervasiveness will be limited because of practical concerns such as the difficulty to create and maintain animated Sign Language and bandwidth constraints that impact on users' browsing experience.

Abstract. The study of sign languages attempts to create a coherent model that binds the expressive nature of signs conveyed in gestures to a linguistic framework. Gesture modelling offers an alternative that provides device independence, scalability and flexibility for the annotation and modelling of linguistic phenomena. This paper presents the requirements and initial experiments to build an input method editor for sign languages. The objective is to design interfaces backed up by computational methods that can infer and use linguistic guidance to model sign language gestures. This in turn produces a linguistically annotated corpus of gesture animations.