Welcome to Braam Jordaan's Website

photo credit: Drisana Levitzke-Gray

Vincent Chauvet from British Columbia, who is President of the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf (CSSD) and Braam Jordaan presented First Animated American Sign Language Dictionary for Young Children: A resource to expand phonological and semantic knowledge - A New Era of Innovative Media, under Special Interest Group (SIG) strand Technology at the XVI World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf.

The presenters demonstrated ASL-phabet.com©[1], a revolutionary animated American Sign Language (ASL) dictionary prototype with flexibility to look up ASL signs according to the aslphabet by their handshapes, their location on the body (eg. forehead, cheek) and movement (eg. circular, up and down). For the first time, Deaf children can look up signs on-line, in their primary language (ASL) provided by an animated character and find their definitions and use in sentences in ASL (with optional English text and voice) along with the English vocabulary counterpart. Flexibility allows the option to look up English words and to find the counterpart in animated ASL. collaborative efforts across three countries in the process of ASL dictionary development.

The project was initiated by Anita Small and Joanne Cripps, co-directors of the Deaf Culture Centre and we all were determined to create the first children’s animated ASL dictionary. The dictionary was to be freely accessible on the Web.

We are proud to have contributed to this important and historic event in the lives of Deaf people around the world – XVI World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf in Durban, South Africa.

[1] © Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf, 2009. ASL-phabet cited wth permission from Dr. Sam Supalla.