Proposal #22: See Me Speak

[kaeff]

SeeMeSpeak is a dictionary for sign language. As our founder Bodo describes it:

“We created something I always dreamed of: A platform that would enable everyone to add and participate in it. A real crowd sourced solution to the problem that is the recording of thousands of signs.”

SeeMeSpeak aims to be fun to use, with minimal friction, and flexible enough to handle ontologies for several languages. It has been incepted during 48 hours as a RailsRumble 2013 hackathon project and was awarded a winner application among the top 10 by expert judges and community members.

Like a wiki, SeeMeSpeak doesn’t require an account to add content (there’s a review flag in order to prevent abuse of of the matter). Instead of a fixed ontology, we want to enable flexible categorization and search based on tags and text. Modern technology and the capabilities of modern browsers to record and play videos natively were drivers on the tech side.

Currently, the project is focussed on evolving the hackathon results into a viable product ready for real-world usage. To reach this milestone, our focus lies on creating a strong user experience, providing a solid & seamless recording process, and getting in shape for collaborating with external interest groups. We’ve spoken to the potential RGSoC team, and the participants developed a vision of evolving SeeMeSpeak into a vibrant community.

The team is free to set priorities on community features. We are very thankful for advancements within this area. Other than that, there are further addressable issues that would help SeeMeSpeak advance. We offer these as a suggestion for the team to prioritize.

• End-to-end testing: Adding automatic tests for the critical user journeys may serve as an introduction to testing tools & strategies, as well as help the team understanding the user experience of the app better
• Browse videos alphabetically
• Enhancing the video upload form: Suggesting & auto-correcting tags
• Detecting the user’s browser language settings to serve the correct translation & content
• Batch import of freely available video sources: Creating an importer for http://nzsl.vuw.ac.nz/, improving the existing DGS wiki importer (import additional information)

We think that SeeMeSpeak serves as a good learning ground for several reasons. First, it serves a social purpose that fits a validated need. As an end-user facing application, it is easier to relate to than a middleware-level gem. It is important for us that the team controls and conducts the complete feature lifecycle following a lean approach - this means we won’t be merely implementing. Instead, we are going to establish contacts with end users via existing organisations & networks to perform user-centric validation & testing.

Have a look at the code in our repository.

I'm available for mentoring the team.

[bitboxer]

Thanks for accepting @seemespeak as a project for the RGSoC. Can't wait to see all the improvements that will happen in those three months!