When digital products make room for Deaf people, it usually takes the form of captions. Captions matter. But for many Deaf people the first language isn't English. It's a sign language: visual, spatial, with its own grammar and vocabulary. Captions are written English, and for many Deaf signers that's a second language.

This post is about a small piece of work that grew out of that difference, and why it's taking us longer than we first thought.

Not one language, but many

There's no single sign language. Auslan, British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language (ISL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are separate languages, each with its own history and community. Auslan and BSL come from the same family and fingerspell with two hands. ISL and ASL fingerspell with one, and they differ from each other too.

Variation runs deeper than that. Left-handed signers lead with the other hand, and some sign languages carry regional or historical variants. A resource made for one sign language isn't a resource for the others.

Fingerspelling is the part of signing that spells words letter by letter on the hands, for names, places and words without an established sign. It's a small part of a sign language. It's also where many hearing people start, and where much of the digital material about sign language begins and ends.

Why a library is needed

Fingerspelling charts and image sets aren't hard to find. When we looked for illustrations for our own research materials, though, we found very little that was both accurate and free to reuse. Most open sign-language projects are built to teach a computer to recognise signs, not to give a designer, teacher or researcher something they can use.

Signing hands are almost absent from the icon sets, illustration libraries and stock images that digital products are built from. When they do appear, there's often no way to tell whether they're right.

That gap is small, but it reflects something larger. Representation in a digital product comes down to who appears in its pictures and whose language it speaks. Deaf signers rarely see their language there. A short fingerspelled welcome won't make a product accessible on its own, but it shows someone thought about who might be using it.

Movement matters

Most of those charts show each letter as a single still handshape. That isn't quite how fingerspelling is signed.

Some letters are defined by movement. In ASL, J and Z are traced through the air, so no single picture holds the whole letter. In the two-handed alphabets of Auslan and BSL, many letters are made by one hand touching the other, and which finger is touched, and how, is what tells them apart. And signers don't hold one letter at a time. They move from one letter to the next, and that movement is part of how a fingerspelled word looks.

That's why the library we hope to build pairs each still with a short clip, and why the method we published checks moving letters frame by frame rather than as a single pose.

What we hope to build

An open library of fingerspelling assets, starting with Auslan, BSL, ISL and ASL and designed so that more sign languages can follow. Each letter would come as a clean illustration and a short clip, with a still version for people who prefer reduced motion, and with left-handed versions checked by signers rather than simply flipped.

Alongside the letters, we'd like to offer short fingerspelled words such as a welcome or a name, free for anyone to use in a website, an app, a lesson or research materials. The library would sit within our Inclusive Images Library, our open collection of inclusive illustrations.

What has to happen first

In 2026 a team of University of Sydney computer science students built a Fingerspelling Asset Generator with us for their capstone project. It produced draft A to Z sets for ASL, Auslan and BSL. They're drafts. No Deaf reviewer has checked them yet, and none is ready to publish.

Making them showed us the hard part. Image generators are good at hands that look like hands. Getting a hand exactly right is harder: the right number of fingers, the thumb on the correct side, the right hand doing the right job. In Auslan and BSL the vowels are told apart by which fingertip of one hand the other hand touches. Move the contact one finger along and it's a different letter. Someone who doesn't sign would never notice. A Deaf reader notices at once.

So we designed a way to check each illustration automatically, comparing the hand that was drawn with the hand that was intended, in the terms that carry meaning in sign: finger shapes, thumb position, palm direction, which hand is which and where the hands touch. We published the method openly on 5 November 2026, so anyone can use it and it stands on the public record as prior art. The full disclosure is free on Technical Disclosure Commons (opens in a new tab) and is also on IP.com (opens in a new tab) as IPCOM000279000D. Our research article explains how it works.

It's a design. We haven't built or measured it, so we make no claims about how well it works.

Each language will also need Deaf consultants: to confirm the right forms and variants, to decide what counts as correct and to sign off the finished set. Nothing will be released without that sign-off.

That's a lot of work still to do, and we don't have a release date. We'd rather take the time and get the hands right.

Questions and answers

What is fingerspelling?

Fingerspelling spells words letter by letter with the hands. Signers use it within a sign language for names, places and words without an established sign. Auslan and British Sign Language fingerspell with two hands; American Sign Language and Irish Sign Language use one.

Aren't captions enough for Deaf people?

Captions matter, but they are written English. For many Deaf people a sign language is their first language and English is a second, so captions alone don't always meet their needs.

What will the fingerspelling library include?

The plan is open fingerspelling assets for Auslan, BSL, ISL and ASL to start with: an illustration and a short clip for each letter, a still version for reduced motion, left-handed versions and short words such as a welcome. There is more work to do before anything is released.

Has the checking method been tested?

Not yet. It is a published design that has not been built or measured, so See Me Please makes no claims about results. Nothing will be released without sign-off from Deaf consultants.

Can anyone use the method?

Yes. See Me Please published it on 5 November 2026 as a defensive publication under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, so anyone can use it and it stands on the public record as prior art.

Thank you

Thank you to the capstone team, Kejia Cao, Kaiyi Cao, Yushu Lu, Donghai Yin, Junyang Chen and Yueyi Song, who built the Fingerspelling Asset Generator. We've worked with capstone teams from the University of Sydney School of Computer Science since 2024.

If you work in sign-language education, in a Deaf-led organisation or on sign-language dictionaries and would like to help review the library when it's ready, we'd like to hear from you.

Read the research

The full method, with figures, is in our research article: Checking sign-language illustrations automatically.