Neil Harris (usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk) [050128 01:44]:
The important question is: what do our potential deaf users _themselves_ want? Then we can worry about who's going to find the motivation to adapt the software appropriately to support their needs. Given the choice of an underlying notation, a nice general way to proceed would to be able to define a vocabulary in some notation, and to then reference that vocabulary using {{template}}s, thus allowing the re-use of the quite complex gestural symbols units that make up sign language. Multi-layered templates could allow whole phrases or sentences to be built up. Presumably the Holy Grail of any such notation would be that it would be expressive enough to allow the generation of sign-language animations at some later date...
The other important question is: to what extent is this [[original research]]? A lot of small dialects don't have teribly standardised orthography and their Wikipedia choosing one is already likely to have a fair bit of [[observer effect]]. Is there a sign language with an accepted standardised notation already, or are we talking about inventing one?
- d.