LaboSignes: an Interactive French Sign Language Recognition Interface

This article presents the design, implementation and evaluation of LaboSignes, a web-based interface for interactive French Sign Language (LSF) recognition, designed to enable search-by-sign for Deaf users. We iteratively designed a gesture-based recording interface, and integrated a lightweight Transformer model enabling low-latency recognition. We evaluated three recording interfaces (gesture-based, posture-based, and button) through a user study with 16 LSF signers. Participants preferred the gesture-based interface, despite comparable recognition accuracy across variants. The study also brings insights into sources of errors, with participants emphasizing the need to accommodate regional sign variations to support linguistic diversity in SL technology design.