Paume

For English or Spanish there are dozens of apps. For French Sign Language there are excellent video dictionaries and a few courses, but there you watch signs, you almost never make them. I wanted an app for people who want to learn LSF ten minutes a day, for instance to talk with a deaf relative.

A sign language is learned with your hands: the app had to make people produce the gesture, not just recognise it, and correct it without the learner’s video ever leaving their phone. It also needed a warm identity that looked neither like clipart nor like a school app.

• Short lessons: watch, redo, recognise, sign from memory, review
• Spaced repetition, with two cards per sign (recognise and produce)
• Camera mirror: the gesture is compared with the reference video, on the device
• Fingerspelling: the manual alphabet, spelling and reading
• Sign dictionary with a card per sign, slow motion and mirror
• Streak, points and daily goal

1. 01Findings

   I reviewed sign language apps and the available figures: about 100,000 deaf people have LSF as their main language and 250,000 people use it (Université de Rouen). A 2024 study (Morett et al.) shows that a sign you have reproduced is remembered better than one you have only watched.

2. 02The lesson loop

   Every lesson follows the same short loop: watch the sign, redo it, recognise it among four options, sign it from memory, then review it at the right time with spaced repetition (FSRS).

3. 03The camera mirror

   MediaPipe finds the hands and shoulders in the browser. The points are normalised to the upper body, then the trajectory is aligned with the signer’s using DTW. The references were precomputed from the 99 videos in the course.

4. 04The identity

   On 20 October I presented three complete directions, each with a logo, palette, typefaces, an app screen and a post: Lumière du jour, Le geste and Atelier papier. I chose Atelier papier, keeping Bricolage Grotesque, the beta’s typeface, for the word “paume”.

5. 05Launch

   The app can be installed and works offline. It is hosted on Cloudflare Pages; a few functions and a D1 database collect feedback and, only with consent, anonymous statistics.

• 22Lessons, in 4 units
• 99Signs filmed by signers, credited
• 26Letters of the manual alphabet
• 0Cookies, and no image sent

This project taught me to think about identity and product together: the colours, type and shadows in the guidelines are the same variables as in the code. The next step is written into the guidelines: have deaf people review the direction and the course before a wider release, since the eye in the palm is a tribute to their language.