About E And IS Signware

The SignWare -- Story from the originator Dr. Lou A. Honary January 1, 2020 The First Sign Language Software Developed in the United State I saw my first microcomputer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in 1977 while at Mankato State University in Minnesota (now Minnesota State University, Mankato). Three years later I was programming on an Apple II computer for my doctoral dissertation project at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). The computers belonged to the Component Works division of John Deere in Waterloo, Iowa. The project required extensive data manipulation and involved a dozen floppy diskettes that were notched so data were recorded on both sides. Dealing with the limitations of a 48-kilobyte standard memory size on the Apple IIs taught me a lot about efficient use of memory space. It happened that my then girlfriend (and now wife of 40 years), Carol, was fluent in the American Sign Language. Before transferring to UNI, she had had a deaf roommate in community college; and had learned to sign. We had met at UNI and I often watched her practice her sign language. The thought occurred to me that if I take pictures of each letter of the alphabet, I could use an Apple Graphic Tablet and trace the images into the computer. It would then be easy to program so that when a letter key is pressed on the computer keyboard, the hand sign for that letter would show up. Easy, I thought. But after I loaded the first couple of line drawings of sign language letters into the memory of the Apple II, it ran out of memory. The digitized hand signs consumed too much memory space. Trying to read the signs off the floppy disk drive was too slow and time consuming. So, to conserve space, I had to come up with an idea to remove all the supplicate pieces of the hand shapes. For example, I reasoned that there is no need for the wrist, to appear 26 times if it is the same in the hand signs. Or the thumb may appear in the same position in 6 of the 26 letters of the alphabet's signs; it could be drawn once and recalled when needed in those signs. So, I re-took the pictures of the 26 letter hand signs in a way that there was minimal movement of the hand; and all the pictures were the same size and faced the camera. Figure 1 illustrates how the wrist is the same in the three letters of A, E, and N. The common areas of these three hand letter signs are circled in different colors: red illustrates the wrist and part of the palm that could be drawn once and used in all three hand signs; the blue lines show the middle finger in closed position drawn once and could be recalled for the letters A and N, and yellow indicates the side of the hand that could be the same for the letters E and N. Figure 1: Areas common to more than one picture were drawn once and used in other pictures With this trick and using about 120 line drawings of different hand parts (such as finger nails, wrists drawn in 3 different positions, knuckles, and lines representing creases in the hand…