All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) announced the five phase one winners of its global “Sign On for Literacy” competition. Each winner is well positioned to use their technology-based innovations to broaden and enhance access to local sign languages and increase the literacy outcomes for deaf children globally.
The competition has ACR GCD as its lead, with collaboration from Deaf Child Worldwide, the Nyle DiMarco Foundation, and the World Federation of the Deaf. Every winner in the first phase received $25,000 in seed funding that helps them pilot their innovations during the second phase of the competition, with two more phases of refinement and review planned.
Each company has the potential to win up to $225,000 in the upcoming rounds.
The five winners are:
- SignShare, by Gallaudet University’s VL2 center, advances sign language literacy development through an open-source digital platform enabling the creation and sharing of signed resources and stories.
- Studio KSL, by eKitabu, uses a visual glossary to produce Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) videos to make accessible books for distribution.
- World Around You, by the National Tech Institute for the Deaf with partnership from De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde in Manila and the Philippine Federation of the Deaf, is an open-content digital library of folktales offered in interactive, bilingual formats integrating local written and signed languages.
- Señas de Sentido (Signs of Meaning), by Manos Unidad and the National Deaf Association of Nicaragua, is a three-pronged innovation that builds a corpus of Nicaraguan Sign Language with Spanish translations and videos, a literacy outreach program to train deaf children’s parents, and a language-learning mobile app with downloadable lessons.
- A Sign Language Option for KitKit School, by Enuma in partnership with the Center for Early Intervention on Deafness, adds a sign-language option to tablet-based early learning program KitKit School, as well as a Sign Documenting App to empower Kenyan and Tanzanian communities to incorporate local sign languages into curriculums.
Deborah Backus, World Vision’s acting project director for ACR GCD, talked about the competition in a press release, saying that ACR GCD identified a critical gap in deaf education through years of programming that would leave millions of deaf children illiterate and without education access. She continued, “The innovations sourced by the Sign On For Literacy prize will help fill this gap and ensure that deaf children have access to literacy and education, a fundamental human right.”
