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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISthe deaf community must be respected in its culture, its identity, its own language. The communitie´sparticular form of communication and understanding of the world must be a part in exercising citizenship.According to Pinsky & Pinsky (2003), to exercise the right of citizenship is a necessity and it is visiblypresent on civil, social-economical and political rights. Citizens must have access to information so that theymay develop critical sense. At this point, it is clear to us that deaf people need adequate technologicalartefacts that would aid them access information, and, consequently, aid them to exercise their citizenship.Sign languages are a legitimate linguistic system, of spacial-gestual-visual manner, capable of providingthe deaf an adequate means to realize all of their linguistic potentialities. Sign languages are not universal,and, just like any oral language, it is different in various countries, and some may vary even within the samecountry or regions or among deaf communities [Stumpf, 2005].To Fernandes (2006:2), Libras is an autonomous, organized lexically (vocabulary), grammatically (rules)and functionally (usages), and is used only in existing groups that are present in agglutinating centers.Approximately 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and, therefore, are not necessarily exposedto the gestual universe that would allow them to acquire sign language naturally. In this context, it isnecessary the use of Libras as a mediator in tools and materials geared towards citizenship of the deaf. InBrazil there are 5.7 million people with some degree of hearing deficiency, with around 3% of this totalconsidered as deaf, according to the census IBGE (www.ibge.org.br). In 2003´s school census it was shownthat only 344 deaf persons attended brazilian universities, demonstrating a high degree of exclusion and theinability of brazilian high education institutions to cope with the demands of the deaf communities.3. RELATED GESTURESAdamo et al (2007) introduce SMILE, a CAVE application for fifth-grade students to learn arithmeticconcepts and the corresponding signs from the American Sign Language (ASL), but fail to deliver content inASL. Furthermore, the system is complex in terms of usability, requiring sophisticated and hard to useequipaments. From Piper et al (2008) comes a Shared Speech Interface that consists of a multitouch tablescreen.The tool advances the state of the art by providing a shared experience of communication between thedeaf and a hearing doctor, in a constructed, cooperative way. However, there remain problems related to theunconfortable necessary presence of an interpreter during the medical appointment, and the fact that the deafperson wasn´t an active participant in the conversation. A future tool that would address these problemsshould be independent of the presence of the interpreter, for example.Turof (1975) investigates how cooperative environments such as instant messages could facilitate thecommunication between the deaf and the hearing. Some of these ideas have been commercially implemented,but they require state-of-the-art, expensive technology if and when fully implemented.Some tools that mediate face-to-face communication are scarce. But, above all, such tools lack thecultural aspect to be used in Brazil. For example, in Brazil, a Congress initiative developed Rybená(www.rybena.org.br) that hasn´t, as yet, been fully adopted by the community due to its lack of context (itdoes not represent the correct syntax, and some signs are spelled).Some studies also focused on the communication for individuals by means of gestual recognition.However, most of the works don´t help the deaf to communicate properly, or even to become an activeparticipant in the conversation. Several authors [Morris et al (2004); Izad et al (2003)] presented incompletetools: either because there lacked solid theoretical base, or because the real needs of the users were not takeninto account, or due to technological limitations (e.g. availability, cost etc.).4. COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURE FOR LIBRASIn Brazil, Libras became the official language of the deaf by law decree number 10.436/2002, that guaranteedrights such as information access in education institutions, the communication in government job selectionand the mandatory teaching of Libras as a subject in teaching under-graduate courses.The following methodology was followed to elaborate the current proposal: A)Literature Review;B)Meeting with community representative; C)Additional conferences with specialists;D)Proposal of theComputational Model;E) Review and Evaluation of the Proposal.268