JAMPAPER 3./IV./2009

CREATING EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES WITH A HUNGARIAN-AUSTRIAN MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY

Závoti Józsefné1, Katona György2

1,2 University of West Benedek Elek Faculty of Pedagogy [email protected] , [email protected]

Abstract The aim of the research and development was to create a multimedia communication tool and accessibility that helps the sign language acquisition of hearing impaired people. Another aim was to compile a common Hungarian - German digital dictionary of sign language used in a foreign language area (Austria) and in Hungary. The digital dictionary has been developed by sign language experts, specialists in surdopedagogy and information specialists from both language areas. A sign research was carried out in both countries to record the currently used signs that correspond to the selected vocabulary. Researchers of NYME (University of West Hungary) concentrated on the signs used by local (West-Transdanubian) deaf and hard of hearing people, while the Austrian partner (Alpen-Adria University, Klagenfurt) employed the Austrian standardized signs. Our digital dictionary (www.omaa.fullnet.hu) also functions as a German-Hungarian, Hungarian-German dictionary as the menu is available both in German and Hungarian languages. The sign languages used in the two countries are simultaneously shown on the display in moving pictures. According to regulations sign language is naturally presented by deaf people in the videos. By watching these motion pictures the user has the opportunity to imitate, acquire and even compare the signs. The dictionary contains the sign of more than one thousand words in a way that etymological explanations are added to all words/signs in both languages. Providing a closer insight into the sign language culture of the neighbouring country, the programme can undoubtedly be useful for sign language teachers as well. The display was tested by Austrian and Hungarian deaf people, whose remarks and suggestions were taken into consideration during development.

Keywords: multimedia, dictionary, deaf, sign language

Antecedents The University of West Hungary Benedek Elek Faculty of Pedagogy has been rather responsive to the requirements of higher education considering the situation of young people living with impairment, so the assistance of some disabled students learning in spontaneous integrated education processes had already been supported by the conception of the Ministry of Education. The different ministry and government decrees and, finally, the Higher Education Law confines unambiguously the inclusion processes as well as the processes promoting and guaranteeing equal study opportunities for young people living with impairment. Beside declared ways of support and in compliance with the training profile of our institution (social welfare, pre-school teaching) we were looking for other opportunities that expand the horizons of students who do not live with disabilities by involving them in the world of students with special needs. Sopron presents special circumstances for social welfare training as not only social services and child welfare institutions are provided for students as practice training scenes, but also different types of institutions for children and adults with special needs. Our students regularly visit institutions for children with mental health difficulties and special needs, schools for children with learning difficulties and for children in state care as well as kindergartens providing integrated education. Among these institutions for special needs education our students are keenly interested in Tóth Antal Kindergarten, Primary School and Methodology Centre. The school was established more than 100 years ago for children who are deaf or hearing impaired. From 1991 the school also provides a programme specifically designed for students with learning disabilities. Time spent among deaf and hard of hearing children is not only a professional but also a moral and emotional experience for

95 JAMPAPER 3./IV./2009 students. It is conveyed by the limited communication possibilities of hard of hearing children, the outstanding attitude of educators and the scale of values the school represents. The special communication of hearing impaired children and their professional educators means a strange and a bit mysterious language for an outsider. Emotional impact, the intention to keep contact with and convey information to other persons as well as trade specification are the most important factors that motivate more and more students to acquire sign language. Considering deaf and hard of hearing young people’s difficulties in socialization processes and their special perceptual and sensory responses, specialists in surdopedagogy from Tóth Antal School, Sopron together with the establishers of Butterfly Wing Foundation (Kovácsné Horváth Erzsébet, Pichlerné Gábor Beáta and Szendrődi Andor) decided to create a digital sign language dictionary in a way that they combined the specific communication requirements with information technology. The geographical situation of Sopron – it is located 6 kilometres from the Austrian border - as well as special methods of teaching in Tóth Antal School suggested the idea that the using community should be available and more understandable for young people who communicate in sign language in Hungary. By this means they tried to expand deaf and hard of hearing young people’s opportunities in employment, student exchange programmes and everyday life situations in Austria. The recognition of sign language as an independent language is considered an issue of constitutional law in Austria. For recognition by law in 2005, Krausneker academic doctor of linguistics, fought firmly by the means of science and minority rights to make equal opportunities successful in the field of communication as well [7]. Integrating sign language into foreign languages means integrating deaf people – as citizens having equal rights - into the society of hearing people. As a relation between new challenges in the profession of social work and requirements of special needs education and rehabilitation, the sign language dictionary manifested itself as an interesting and new opportunity for social welfare students, on the other hand accessibility was quite attractive for hard of hearing students of the university. The financial support of the Austrian-Hungarian Action Fund [17] made it possible to start the project with the cooperation of the Centre for Sign Language and Deaf Communication at the Alpen-Adria University, Klagenfurt and the University of West Hungary Benedek Elek Faculty of Pedagogy, Sopron. From the Austrian partner’s side Prof. Franz Dotter and Marlene Hilzensauer worked actively in the project, which was carried out in two cycles: between March 2007 – March 2008 and September 2008 – July 2009.

Creating equal opportunities The Act promoting equal opportunities for the impaired and their integration into the society defines the advocacy skills of the impaired and the adequate adaptation on the part of the society. This can manifest itself in many different ways depending on the type and degree of impairment. In case of hearing impaired persons, language barriers in administration must be eliminated. A typical way of providing communicational accessibility is to guarantee the presence of a sign language interpreter and it is the public institutions and offices that are responsible for the organisational tasks related to this condition. Young people with hearing impairment studying in higher education also make use of this requirement. In their case the finances can be covered using the per capita support or other funds promoting equal opportunities. Having studied in an adequate institution within the framework of public education, hard of hearing young people enter the majority society where they get confronted with a number of hearing and communication barriers. Since the educational institutions practicing segregated teaching are aware of this fact and of how frustrating such experiences can be, they search for processes that could help their students’ future integration into the society with fewer conflicts. Apart from the standards in education, special education and rehabilitation, they look for and facilitate programmes and projects that are able to answer the challenges caused by changes in the society and economy in order to successfully integrate young people with impairment into the society.

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Aims of research and development Not only a good command of both languages but also an extensive knowledge of the given geographical units and the related characteristics of linguistics and cultural anthropology were needed to create the Austrian – Hungarian sign language dictionary. Sign language should not be considered in any way to be a translated form of another oral or written language. It is rather a difficult connection between a kind of thinking and grammatical structure determined by the biological condition of the deaf individual and the cultural, behavioural and habitual structure of the person’s human environment. According to Franz Dotter [4] sign language is not a simple speech but a characteristic system of signs including several kinds of different elements. This system is varying; even a segregated institution or a circle of deaf individuals can use unique signs. As in most countries, there is a tendency for standardization of signs in Austria and Hungary as well, however, standardization processes are not constant in the language of Hungarian and Austrian or German deaf people. For that reason one of the research aims of the project is to carry out a sign research in both countries and in the region, which provides a base to create the common Austrian-Hungarian sign language dictionary. In the course of the common research approaching our aim required constant harmonization of work and continuous communication between the two partners. As a consequence the aim of the research and development was to create a multimedia communication tool and accessibility that helps the sign language acquisition of hearing impaired people. Another aim was to compile a common (Hungarian - Austrian/German) digital dictionary of sign language used in a foreign language area (Austria) and in Hungary. Approaching these aims enables social welfare experts and educators in both countries to access the sign language dictionary as well as assists the social integration of hearing impaired people to a great extent.

Multimedia creating equal opportunities The Internet and the multimedia may become important means in creating equal opportunities for persons living with different forms of impairment (visual, hearing, mobility, mental, multiple impairments or autism). If one of the communication channels (sight or hearing) is disabled, it is possible to compensate for the lost channel and open up new ways of communication to the impaired. In the case of the mobility impaired, on-line communities can provide new forms of creating and maintaining contacts. This way the abilities and opportunities that our impaired peers are deprived of in the real world can partly be made up for in the virtual world. Therefore, systems development managers bear serious responsibilities in setting the direction of developments in the virtual space and in communication taking place there. For example, the strengthening of the visual channel and its nearly monopolistic situation may lead to the exclusion of the visually impaired from the virtual space. However, the same tendency enhances the chances of the hearing impaired because in the virtual space their impairment only means a small disadvantage. According to a study carried out by the American research institute CITEd (Centre for Implementing Technology in Education) multimedia applications can support hearing impaired students in learning in five ways:  by enhancing the accessibility and comprehensibility of educational material  by building new communicational channels  by supporting skills development  by enabling distance learning  by providing exercises to discovery learning

It can be added that the hearing impaired may also expand the range of communicational and educational methods by developing multimedia material or homepages themselves. Speech recognition softwares bring in a further dimension of multimedia developments aimed at the hearing impaired. The two main branches of speech recognition are concerned with turning speech into text

97 JAMPAPER 3./IV./2009 or into signs. An example of such projects is Liberated Learning, which is running with the cooperation and support of different international actors. Different sources of communicational and educational multimedia materials for hearing impaired can be available on the Internet ([11], [12], [13], [15], [16], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], etc.) or through deaf associations in most highly developed countries. Training packages, teaching aids and supplementary materials on these websites refer to diversity in sign languages, differences between regions and generations, age groups (e.g. materials specially designed for children), topics (science, religion, politics, etc) or even materials for particular regions (e.g. Scottish and Northern-Irish versions can also be found on an English website). Researchers lay special emphasis on multimedia developments aimed at the education of hearing impaired children [9], [5]. Although references on the acquisition of a second sign language [10] as well as offers of bilingual sign language interpreters can be found on the Internet, we could not explore any bilingual multimedia sign language dictionaries on these websites. Therefore our initiative and development can be considered as unique in this area.

Considerations behind systems development The creation of any multimedia dictionary can only be successful if the classic steps in systems development are adhered to. Therefore, the steps in the present development must also follow the line: analysing – design – programming – checking – testing – running – maintenance.  Analysing: As a first step, the aim of development has to be clarified, secondly the target group, for whom the development is made, needs to be analyzed. Expansion and depth of the given content has to be defined and the opportunities and barriers need to be identified.  Design: The next step of the process is structure design, the depth of which depends on the aim of development. The media structure of the material has to be defined in parallel with content and structure design namely, we have to define the content and the means of its presentation as well as the channels we wish to use to approach our developmental aims.  Programming: On the basis of our plans the development environment has to be selected and the programme needs to be created. Programme testing, verification and validation need multiple checking to ensure that our system meets specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose. In our case the multimedia material also has to be created in this phase.  Checking and testing: Checking and testing application starts with the program modules and goes on with testing the structure. Later outside experts and finally average users test the application.  Running and maintenance: In case of development of a digital dictionary, which is a teaching material at the same time, this phase includes testing the dictionary in educational practice as well as the continuous revision according to the experience gained. Obviously, the way the phases listed above connect and become a unified process depends also on the systems development model used. The present study describes a development that is characterised by the sequential steps of the waterfall model; that is how the application was realised.

IT development Analyses As the first step in development we clarified the content elements. During the consultations with the Austrian partner we made it clear what the software should contain, how it should be constructed and what it should know. The finally accepted format was developed by summarising ideas, remarks and comments from both sides. During the first phase of content development we selected the 2 x 1000 words. These words were discussed, modified and classified according to linguistic aspects, the meanings were matched and eventually they were finalized after gaining agreement from both sides. The next steps were filtering and interpretation by sign language interpreters and deaf people and sign research in relation with the given words. Design

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Designing the draft of the display was finalized by graphic works at professional quality. As far as database design is concerned the platform independent web application with online/offline opportunity was an essential point of view. Considering all of these aspects we selected Flash 8.0 and XML technology. Programming – preparing multimedia material The first step in the preparation process of the multimedia material was shooting the test pictures with the help of which light and colour conditions, background adjustments and camera setup were defined. This tested setup was then used in filming the signs previously agreed on. The shooting progressed as the signs chosen by the deaf to the words on our list came in. It was also deaf people who stood in front of the cameras in the shooting and signed their own language. All signs were recorded in avi format. The finished recording contains the signs belonging to the different words successively; therefore, it has to be cut into appropriate length bits. Each word has an avi file belonging to it. Our software supports Flash videos, so the recordings in avi format needed to be converted into swf format. In the course of the conversion the suitable picture size had to be set as well. The next task was to study the components offered in Flash 8.0 and to write test scripts. Finally, we got rid of the components and created a unique programme code to connect to the database. When designing the search engines, emphasis was put on the highest speed possible, a capacity to work on a large amount of data and user-friendly features. The algorithms created specifically to the programme were realised in a modular structure to enable easier testing. As far as the design is concerned, we aimed at a unique appearance using our own graphics to avoid copyright problems. It was also important to tune on a resolution of 1024x768, because this way the programme can also be viewed on older screens without scrolling. There were a number of layouts drawn up mainly using Adobe Photoshop and in some cases with the help of Corel Draw. As an important consideration behind the design, it had to be ensured that the finished graphic elements, once they have been inserted into Flash, will not enlarge the size of the swf so created. This was necessary to guarantee fast online operation of the programme. These steps were followed by the upload of the data structure. The xml file was so created and continually expanded. To any given sign or expression we assigned the category in which the word comes up in the programme, the word or expression itself in Hungarian and in German, the movie showing the sign, that is, the sign language element belonging to the word in swf format and the “etymology” behind the sign. This last element is important because it can help in remembering why a given word is signed as it is, what it is related to and where it comes from. There are separate explanations to the Austrian and Hungarian signs and the explanations provided by our Austrian partners have to be seen in both German and in Hungarian. The same is true of the Hungarian explanations as well; it needs to appear in both languages at the same time. The xml file was expanded continually and uploaded on the domain server in bits. Checking and testing Testing the videos was a continuous process to filter poor quality recordings, which were shot again later. As the next step we tested the programme by examining scripts and data structure (blocks, variables) with an extreme quantity of data (20000) and different speed tests. The finished programme was tested by hearing and hearing impaired people. Their requests were highly considered in the finalized version; we made modifications and changes according to their suggestions. They did not notice any errors that could be associated with the operation of the software, in the course of testing the software worked steadily (Fig. 1). Running and maintenance A sign language dictionary cannot be considered a static system as its sign language material is continually expanded, on the other hand even the signs and their related meanings may change from time to time. Therefore, not only a usual system control is required but the continuous maintenance of the database of the dictionary as well.

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language the selected word and the videos of the video play speed Wikipedia links for selection signs belonging to the word both languages

word selection Hungarian and German description of the etymology of both signs

Figure 1: Display [18] and functional elements of the bilingual sign language dictionary

Summary Creating the Hungarian-German (Austrian) sign language dictionary provided an excellent opportunity for hearing impaired people living in different countries and under different conditions to establish personal contacts and become familiar with each other’s culture. One of the most essential ideas of creating equal opportunities for people living with different forms of impairment, namely the realization of the principle of subsidiarity manifested itself in this project. An impaired individual, who knows of the features of his own situation best, can change this situation himself for the sake of social integration and equal opportunities. In the course of the cooperation not only bilateral professional connections between NYME (University of West Hungary) and the Centre for Sign Language and Deaf Communication (Alpen-Adria University, Klagenfurt) were strengthened but fields of special needs education and rehabilitation as well. Beside the primary function of the software – a sign language dictionary – it also works as a foreign language dictionary due to the two used languages; visual – motional presentation of words and expressions can make memorization easier for hearing people as well.

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In the course of the social welfare training programme we lay special emphasis on providing our students with the opportunity to get acquainted with this project. As a result, these prospective professional helpers become personally and professionally motivated to acquire the vocabulary of the given sign language, this way they will be able to serve the adequate assistance of hearing impaired people in the future. Eliminating language barriers by using any methods or tools can be considered a step for hearing impaired persons to the society of hearing people. Our project proved that in the hands of competent specialists information technology, multimedia and services of the virtual world can manifest themselves as excellent tools of integration and target realization for people living with different forms of impairment.

References [1] Bartha Csilla, Hattyár Helga és Szabó Mária Helga, A magyarországi siketek közössége és a magyarországi jelnyelv. In: Kiefer Ferenc (szerk.), Magyar nyelv. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, (2006) 852-906 [2] CITEd, Multimedia Instruction for Students Who Are Deaf, http://www.cited.org/index.aspx?page_id=153,( 2009) [3] Csala-Csetényi-Tarlós, Informatika alapjai, Computerbooks, Budapest, (2001) [4] Dotter, Franz, Gebärdensprache in der Gehörlosenbildung: Zu den Argumenten und Einstellungen ihrer Gegner. - In: Das Zeichen 5 (1991), S. 321-332 [5] Gentry, M. M., Chinn, K. M., & Moulton, R.D. , Effectiveness of multimedia reading materials when used with children who are deaf. American Annals of the Deaf, 149(5), (2004/2005) [6] Illyés Sándor, szerk.,Gyógypedagógiai alapismeretek, ELTE-BGGYFK, Budapest, 526-529., (2000) [7] Krausneker,Verena, Taubstumm bis gebärdensprachig. Die Österreichische Gebärdensprachgemeinschaft aus soziolinguistischer Perspektive Meran-Bozen-Klagenfurt, AlphaBeta Verlag-Drava Verlag, (2006.) [8] Lancz E, A Magyar Jelnyelv Szótára, Steven Besbero (szerk.) Siketek és Nagyothallók Országos Szövetsége, Budapest, (1999) [9] Loeterman, M., Paul, P.V., & Donahue, S, Reading and deaf children. Reading Online, 5(6), (2002, February) [10] Suzuki – Horikoshi – Kakihana, Bilingual Sign Language Dictionary for Learning a Second Sign Language without Learning the Target Spoken Language, ACL, www.aclweb.org/anthology- new/W/W04/W04-2212.pdf, (2004) [11] Free resource for the classroom teacher, www.aslpro.com,(2009) [12] English – resource for the young, www.deafplanet.com, (2009) [13] Online sign language dictionary, www.handspeak.com, (2009) [14] Homepage of an international speech recognition project, www.liberatedlearning.com, (2009) [15] Homepage of the National Association of the Deaf in the USA, www.nad.org, (2009) [16] Homepage of the National Association of the Deaf in Austria (Österreichische Gehörlosenbund), www.oeglb.at, (2009) [17] Homepage of the Austrian-Hungarian Action Fund, www.omaa.elte.hu, (2009) [18] Homepage of the Hungarian-Austrian sign language dictionary, www.omaa.fullnet.hu, (2009) [19] Homepage of the Royal Association for Deaf People in the UK, www.royaldeaf.org.uk, (2009) [20] Homepage of the Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People in the UK, www.signature.org.uk, (2009) [21] Commercial homepage of American sign language multimedia materials published by Sign Media Inc., www.signmedia.com, (2009) [22] Homepage of the National Association of the Deaf in Hungary, www.sinosz.hu, (2009) [23] French sign language multimedia homepage, www.websourd.org, (2009)

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