TalkingHANDS – a project about the deaf.

Abstract

Amidst the hustle and bustle of commuters shuffling from place to place and the chattering and small talks that were going on just beside me, there was a group of secondary students that caught my attention. They were

communicating with each other not with their mouths but with their hands. Their communication involved a combination of hand gestures, animated facial expressions and body movements that seem to form a beautiful

dance movement in its own right. This incident inspired me to know more about them.Many questions about the Deaf started to arise within me. I was ashamed that I had no concrete knowledge and had never felt the need to learn sign language in order to communicate withthis community. I began to survey my peers on how much they knew about the Deaf Community and realized that the majority, like me, did not know much as well. This thus sparked an interest in a project that seeks to create awareness about the Deaf to the public and encourage people to

take an active role to know and accept them not as a disadvantaged group but a vibrant and engaging community that they are. TalkingHANDS houses the wealth of research done and is crafted to achieve the objectives set out in the project as well as to wave information in a sizeable manner that seeks to inform and also serve as an introductory platform to learn simple sign languge used by the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing.