A Personalisable Electronic Book for Video-based Sign Language ...

Conclusions
To date, relatively little work has been directed towards providing online educational resources for the deaf,
although the WWW is now a major source of educational information for the hearing. We believe, that for deaf
children to have quality education throughout their lives, information contained within the WWW must be
tailored to address their accessibility needs. The research reported in this paper is motivated by the view that,
through the application of P&A techniques, it may be possible to provide deaf students with equal access to
WWW-based educational resources.
In this paper, we present KSO, a personalisable electronic book for the teaching of British Sign Language to deaf
children and their tutors. The novelty of KSO is that it incorporates advanced P&A techniques into the
development of a WWW-based electronic book. Through the use of the P&A techniques employed during the
development of KSO, we aim to broaden the accessibility of online sign language learning materials. In this
paper, we have illustrated how, through a combination of digital video, textual descriptions and assessment
exercises, it is possible to devise an individualised learning environment for the deaf.
KSO is a demonstration system, whose architecture is based upon a complete formalisation of P&A actions in
hypermedia systems. We aim, through future development, to test the effectiveness of various P&A actions in
the application area of deaf online learning.
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