Evaluation of a Sign Language Support System for Viewing Sports Programs

As information support to deaf and hard of hearing people who are viewing sports programs, we have developed a sign language support system. The system automatically generates Japanese Sign Language (JSL) computer graphics (CG) animation and subtitles from prepared templates of JSL phrases corresponding to fixed format game data. To verify the system's performance, we carried out demonstration experiments on the generation and displaying of contents using real-time match data from actual games. From the experiment results we concluded that the automatically generated JSL CG is practical enough for understanding the information. We also found that among several display methods, the one providing game video and JSL CG on a single tablet screen was most preferred in this small-scale experiment.