Fantastic Feeback

Árni and I (Trausti) have been working to prepare the launch of Signer Studio this summer.

Over the winter, Signer Studio was used at SHH (Communication Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing) and Hliðarskóli (Elementary School).  The beta version of Signer Studio was used for a number of translation and interpretation projects at SHH and for various assignments at Hlíðarskóli. This resulted in some fantastic feedback about the use of Signer Studio and pointers to various issues that people had.

The feedback has resulted in various improvements, including the following:

• The motion based segmentation was too sensitive and stopped for pauses that were too short. This made it very stressful to use. The motion detection now waits longer before determining the sentence is complete. However, we may introduce an adjustable sensitivity setting to accommodate different signing styles and rates and we are continuing to improve this feature.
• Users asked for better image quality to capture expressions on the signer’s face. Different versions of the iPad have differing image quality and compression quality. The beta version used a very aggressive compression that was appropriate for old iPad 2. An upcoming version will utilize the best image quality of each device.

We are releasing Signer Studio now as an app, but an online system for storing and sharing projects is in the works. Some issues will be addressed when the online system comes live are:

•  Currently teachers need to recreate an assignment in each iPad which is very time consuming. The online system will address this issue by allowing a teacher to send assignments to all student iPads.

We would like to thank the staff at SHH and Hlíðarskóli for their valuable feedback, especially, Hjördís, Eyrún and Sara at Hlíðarskóli and Kría at SHH.

Your feedback is invaluable for us to improve Signer Studio so please send feedback to me trausti@signerstudio.com.