Teach Yourself Auslan (Computer)

Teach yourself Auslan in addition to providing individual words also provided the target words within a sentence. Because Auslan and English do not have identical structure the Auslan glossing was provided which is the literal translation of the sign in addition to the English equivalent. Providing the two texts beside each other draws attention to the difference in grammatical structure.

Settings could be made within the software to cater for individual preferences. The ability to change settings made it a better user experience of learners of different abilities. The settings included: the region; the number of times that a sign is played; if sentences are played in addition to changing the background colour.

Another feature of the software was that was made to dynamically load all of the pages by finding the names in an excel spread sheet. So each page had a number of audio, video files, text and images that were automatically loaded as long as the file name was in the excel spread sheet and the resources were stored in the correct folder. The idea of the design was that I would be involved in the original design and then Deaf Children Australia could develop a series of DVDs to target a wider range of signs. this worked extremely well as a concept and after the initial version with 250+ signs another 3 versions of the software developed that taught more that 800 signs overall. This is a much more extensive resource that is often developed as the same signs tend to be targeted by multiple resources, while other signs are not taught despite the fact that they may be useful.