The
goal of ViSiCAST is to improve the quality of life of Europe's
deaf citizens by widening their access to services and facilities
enjoyed by the community at large. The project identifies
a number of aspects of life where the integration of deaf
individuals in society would be improved if sign language
communication was available: access to public services,
commercial transactions and entertainment, learning and
leisure opportunities including broadcast and interactive
television and the e-commerce and the World Wide Web.
The
chosen medium of communication for the deaf community is
the European deaf languages and hence services and facilities
must be made accessible through these recognised European
languages. The core of the project will build and strengthen
partner's detailed understanding of the richness and complex
structure of these languages. At the same time it will develop
complex computer linguistic methods to convert contextual
speech and text to machine readable form fto generate appropriate
intelligible sign.
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European
legislation (being implemented within the statutes of the
Member States) now requires that access to all services is
made equally available to all citizens. This will mean that
a very large number of companies, offering very diverse services,
will have to address the issue of communication with sensory
impaired people. At present, such communication relies heavily
upon human sign language interpreters, but there can never
be enough of these skilled individuals to be present at every
face-to-face interaction or even to sign a large proportion
of broadcast television. |