Protik: Bangla Sign Language Teaching Aid for Children with Impaired Hearing

The disabled peoples take up a large percentage of our community but their education is often ignored. A big percentage of our population has a hearing disability where most are left illiterate. While the adults grow up to associate some written words or signs with sign language, children have a hard time doing the same thing. As most children with hearing disabilities communicate via sign language only, learning to read and write is more difficult for them than it is for a normal child because of this association of written words with the spoken words used in our day to day lives. In this paper, we propose a model to aid children with hearing disabilities to learn to read and write without intensive guidance. The proposed model con convert PDF of paper books to the corresponding sequence of signs in Bangla sign language, making it easier for the disabled children to associate the words with their usage. The model can be used as an aid to teach the children while also acting as a medium for the children to read various books. The Tesseract OCR has been used to convert the images in the PDF to texts and the sequence of words is generated using one to one mapping. For the PDF to text conversion, 81.75% accuracy has been reported for the OCR model for Bangla.