AssistLIBRAS: Uma Ferramenta de Autoria para a Construção de Sinais da LIBRAS

The Deaf is socially excluded because it has different needs, such as to communicate. The process of inclusion of Deaf people is through the use of their native language, sign language. In Brazil, we have the LIBRAS (Brazilian Sign Language), covered by Law No. 10.436 of 2002, which makes its obligatory use as a means of promoting accessibility. Even with the support of this legislation, the deaf does not have full accessibility, because there is great difficulty in the use of interpreters, who can not meet the demand of organizations and society in general. Thus, it is prudent to make proper use of current technologies in order to provide means to cover this gap. However, there are few specific technologies for this purpose because it is a complex language, with very specific grammar and semantics, such as its parameters (hand configuration, pivot point, facial / body language, direction and movement) which constitute the basic unit of language, the sign. This paper presents a proposal for an authoring tool, through which experts can create the raw material of language (the signs) and can use this in some other assistive technology, such as: a translator, or dictionary. The study was conducted based on the investigation of the problem by surveying the current state of the art, validation through interview, case of use in the form of usability testing, and analysis of results. The tool was designed according to the end-user needs. The results were: the sign language teacher and the layperson in computer graphics and sign language built four signals, each with ascending scale of quality and compared to the time spent on each sign, getting a significant result. The final evaluation performed by deaf user also showed the effectiveness of the result produced by the wizard, by observing a few sentences performed with the signals produced in a Portuguese-POUNDS translator, reporting their level of understanding and satisfaction.