🤟sign-language translator

what it is. a real-time sign-language (indian sign language, mostly) to text translator that runs from a webcam. point a camera at your hands, sign, get text. nothing fancier than that.

why i built it

accessibility is one of those things that feels obvious until you try to build it and realize how invisible the work is. i wanted to understand, from the inside, what "real-time" actually costs — and where open-source sign language datasets end and real humans begin.

what i learned

• data is the whole game. isl datasets are small, inconsistent, and heavily biased to studio conditions. my living-room webcam is not studio conditions.
• temporal pooling matters. a static snapshot misses half the meaning — sign is motion, not a pose.
• evaluation is humbling. "it works on the demo sentence" and "it works for a deaf user who signs naturally" are two different universes.
• i left this one alive, not finished. there's a lot more to do here. if you sign and want to collaborate, reach out.