All over Europe deaf people have the same problems with written language. They very often show a poor written language competence, even if they have already completed their education. This makes it very difficult for them to gain access to the many sources of written information today, which are open to our hearing society quite naturally. Hence they are hereby hindered to use modern communication services like Fax, WWW, Internet newsgroups and the like to their full potential and are in danger to be excluded from our information society more and more. This would reduce their already bad chances in the labour market even further.

The Project Idea In order to help deaf people to gain full access to written information, it is vitally important for them to improve their competence in written language(s). Therefore the overall intention of the project is the development of a multimedia written language course for the Deaf.

A Prototype language course application on CD-ROM will be developed in the scope of the project. Along with the prototype versions a general platform will be developed in order to allow easy and straightforward implementations of different European languages.

SMILE will be obtainable in an English, Swedish and a German version.

Available Summer 2001