Sign languages and technology: are we building for everyone?

2 days ago
2 min read

Today, 14 June, marks National Spanish Sign Language Day. The date commemorates the founding of the National Confederation of Deaf People (CNSE) in 1936, and has been marked on the official calendar since 2014 following a decision by the Council of Ministers.

According to the INE’s Disability Survey (2020), there are 1,230,000 people in Spain with some form of hearing impairment. Of these, 27,300 use sign language as their primary means of communication. This figure has risen by 105% compared to the previous survey in 2008. LSE (Spanish Sign Language) and LSC (Catalan Sign Language) are their languages: not support systems, not manual representations of Spanish or Catalan, but full languages with their own grammar, officially recognised by Law 27/2007.

Official logo for National Spanish Sign Language Day, produced by the CNSE

What technology promises and what it has yet to deliver

In recent years, tools have emerged that point in the right direction: sign recognition using computer vision, AI-generated signing avatars, and educational platforms with automatic interpretation. But there is a recurring structural problem: most are trained on very limited corpora, and British Sign Language is almost always left out. The avatars make grammatical errors that any native user would spot in seconds. And most digital content – online public services, streaming platforms, e-learning – still fails to offer sign language interpretation on a systematic basis.

The gap is not one of intention. It is about who is at the table when these solutions are designed.

Inclusion designed from the ground up

The digital spaces being built today (virtual environments, conversational interfaces, educational platforms) will determine whether they are for everyone or just for a select few. That decision is not made at the end of the development process. It is made at the very beginning, when we define who they are being built for.

At Brainlab Fira, we believe that technological innovation has an active responsibility here. Including the deaf community as expert users, rather than as a secondary use case, is the starting point.