From creating virtual gestures to ”writing” in sign languages

Sign languages have been proven to be natural languages, as capable of expressing human thoughts and emotions as traditional languages are. The distinct visual and spatial na-ture of sign languages seems to be an insurmountable barrier for developing a sign language word processor. However, we argue that with the advancement of computer graphics technology and graphical implementations of linguistic re-sults obtained from the study of sign languages, writing in a sign language should not be difcult. We have pursued exploratory work in constructing virtual gestures, applying hand constraints to facilitate the creation of natu-ral gestures, and combining these gestures into meaningful American Sign Language (ASL) parts that follow the ASL Movement-Hold model. The results, although preliminary, are encouraging. We believe that effective sign language composition is possible with the implementation of easy-to-use graphical user interfaces and the development of spe-cialized data management methods