This is not your conventional sign language app, this is Indigenous Hands SignApp, a mobile and web-based pedagogy for all indigenous and endangered signing communications. Indigenous Hands was born out of the need to bridge the communication gap between deaf children and their families and to create early sign language access for deaf children born in isolated deaf communities. Across societies, deaf children are born in hearing families, others become deaf in infant age when language has hardly been formed. Several of these children pass infant age with little or no access to signed language, consequently, they grow up with poor linguistic and cognitive skills. Findings from our research across African and American deaf communities show that many deaf children learn a formal signed language for the first time in a deaf school and they learn a variety of signed language that is generally taught in school. This seems to further strain the communication gap between the deaf children and their parents, because the parents do not get to go back to school to learn signed language. On the other hand, some deaf children are found to develop home signs while others acquire village signs before they get enrolled in school, much of which get dropped as the deaf child gets into the school and learns the mainstream signs.
immediate environment of the deaf child, which in most cases represent the most important cultural identity of the deaf child. Indigenous Hands (iHands) SignApp is a product of several years of research in deaf communities in Africa, where we found many deaf children growing up without early access to signed language, but more importantly, we found out that these deaf children have minimal communication with their immediate families, which seems to impact their general cognitive skills and psychosocial wellbeing. With further studies, we became aware that this is not just an African problem, but a problem presenting itself in different ways across deaf communities in the world. As a result, we invented Indigenous Hands to solve this most neglected global problem.
Indigenous Hands will:
• Bridge the communication gap between deaf children and their families
• Improve the communicative competence of all sign language users
• Enhance linguistic and cognitive skills of deaf children
• Ensure early sign language access for all sign language users
• Redefine early intervention program for all children with communication challenges
• Create a pathway for bilingual education for all sign language users
• Promote, protect, and preserve indigenous and endangered signing heritages
Indigenous Hands (iHands) SignApp is a pedagogical system for minority, and indigenous signed languages of our immediate environment. The system is divided into different lessons, each lesson representing different categories with subcategories. The signed videos are documented from different local deaf communities, some were self-documented by the deaf signers using the only video tool available to them – cell phones. If the videos do not portray the scintillating environment that you are familiar with on the digital space, bear with us, we pride in the indigenous heritages they represent.
As you are about to explore this unique platform, be aware that the lessons on iHands SignApp are organized in a variety of sections, which includes Lexical Signs, Questions & Answers, Short Expressions, Deaf Signers Short Stories and Literacy/Literary Books and Stories. We will continue to update the app with these sections as we go on. The book, “My Hero is You” is the first literacy book to be translated into indigenous sign languages. My Hero is You is a children’s literacy book on how to fight the coronavirus and its aftermath in our communities and thereby becoming a hero.