presentations

[Guylhem Aznar <signwriting-gnome externe net>]

Hello,

A quick presentation - I've been lurking on this list for the past 2 weeks.

My name is Guylhem Aznar, I'm a PhD student in CS in Toulouse, France, and a
medical resident. In my online life, I'm the coordinator of the english LDP
(en.tldp.org), the guy who implemented euro support on GNU/linux, the canadian
standard keybord (X4.2), the ex-maintainer of afterstep window manager,  and
globally a GNU guy (guylhem gnu org) 

My research is focusing on the written forms of the sign language
(www.signwriting.org)
To sum up, there's no real free software way for deafs to write, while more and
more especially in south america are adopting signwriting.
I intend to create a complete and innovative suite of tools based on standards
such as unicode ... and gnome :-)

Here I see everyone is focusing on Braille- is there no interest for deafs?

I would like to know what would be the proper way to create something that would
be integrated into gnome :
 - true type signwriting fonts
 - a virtual drawboard to type signwriting chars
 - a signwriting locale (translating menus, etc.)
 - a video annotator (deafs keep video files - they should be able to annotate
and index them in signwriting
 - a signwriting reader application
 - a signwriting virtual signer to animate signwriting texts 

There's a lot of work to do and I fear I may not be able to do everything alone.
At the moment I'm trying to create a community but every kind of help is welcome
[including grants :-) I've some experiements to do in Brasil to try to
understand better how deafs use current signwriting tools]

I will be giving a conference in Luxembourg on Nov 8 - I see on the schedule
other ppl form gnome accessibility should be there.
Maybe we could meet?

Guylhem

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