Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People
Along with jet packs and hover boards, a machine to translate from any language to any other is so appealing as a fantasy that people are willing to overlook clunky prototypes as long as they can retain the belief that the future promised by science fiction has, at last, arrived. One particularly clunky subspecies of the universal language translator has a rather dismal history: the sign-language glove, which purports to translate sign language in real time to text or speech as the wearer gestures. For people in the Deaf community, and linguists, the sign-language glove is rooted in the preoccupations of the hearing world, not the needs of Deaf signers.
The basic idea dates to the 1980s, when researchers started exploring how humans could interact with computers using gestures. In 1983, a Bell Labs engineer named Gary Grimes invented a glove for data entry using the 26 manual gestures of the American Manual Alphabet, used by speakers of American Sign Language. But the first glove intended to make interactions between deaf and non-deaf people easier by the Stanford University researchers James Kramer and Larry Leifer. It was called the itself.
