Do you do ooVoo?

I hadn’t heard about this latest way to video chat online, ooVoo.

A Deaf Mom Shares her World has a great post about her use of the program.

Read my hands

Remember a couple of years ago when some MIT students invented an alarm clock that rolled away from you and you had to get out of bed to turn it off? Neat idea, but I would have destroyed it within the first day.

Even neater … two students at Carnegie Mellon have invented a glove that will read sign language and accompanying software that will transfer the sign language into text on a cell phone.

The glove is still in its very early stages and can only read a basic set of motions developed by the inventors, not ASL. But the glove has a lot of potential and has already been programmed to recognize 15 of the 26 letters in the ASL alphabet.

I think something like this could go a long way toward breaking down language barriers between deaf and hearing people, but I doubt the capacity of the glove to ever fully communicate what the deaf person is trying to say.

In my experience with my grandparents and hard of hearing friends, so much of communication is based on a subtle facial expression or body posture. There’s no way the glove could pick up on that. Also, ASL is very difficult to pin down as a language. I have a very hard time reading sign language, because each person has their own slightly different dialect with nuanced variations. I grew up most of my life talking only to my grandparents, and we use our own kind of shorthand for a lot of things. So while I think the glove could be handy for basic communication, say when you’re running errands, I don’t think there’s any substitute for reading the body language as a whole.

Note: I can’t take it from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Site and embed it on my blog, but if you click over to the story on their site, they have a video demonstrating how the HandTalk works.