ZINinNGT: A Mobile Tool to Aid Hearing Parents Learning Dutch Sign Language
Jos Ritmeester, Beyza Sümer, Marije Boonstra, Maartje de Meulder, Belinda van der Aa, Floris Roelofsen · 2024 · Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '24) · doi:10.1145/3663548.3688529
Summary
This short paper examines the potential of ZINinNGT, a mobile learning application designed to help hearing parents of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children learn Dutch Sign Language (Nederlandse Gebarentaal, NGT). The research addresses a critical communication gap: over 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and most of these parents have no prior experience with sign language. Despite sign language being essential for the linguistic, cognitive, and social development of DHH children, hearing parents face significant barriers to learning it — limited availability of classes, long waiting lists, high costs, difficulty finding childcare during classes, and a lack of learning materials that go beyond isolated vocabulary to teach sentence-level grammar and conversational skills. The ZINinNGT app was designed to complement (not replace) formal sign language education by providing on-demand, contextually relevant sentence-level content organised around everyday parenting scenarios such as mealtime, getting dressed, and bedtime routines. The researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with ten hearing parents of DHH children in the Netherlands to understand their current sign language learning experiences and gather feedback on the prototype.
Key findings
Parents reported that existing sign language learning resources were overwhelmingly focused on individual signs (vocabulary) rather than how to combine signs into sentences — a gap the ZINinNGT app directly addresses by presenting signs in sentence context with video demonstrations. All ten parents expressed a very positive attitude toward using a mobile app for sign language learning, particularly valuing the ability to practise at home during spare moments (while cooking, before bedtime routines) rather than only in scheduled class settings. Parents highlighted that learning signs relevant to their daily interactions with their child — not generic sign language — was most motivating and useful. Feedback on the prototype identified several needs: enhanced usability (clearer navigation, search functionality), the addition of quizzes for self-assessment, information about handshapes to support accurate production, and slow-motion playback of sign videos. Importantly, parents acknowledged that an app alone cannot overcome many of the fundamental challenges they face — the emotional adjustment to having a deaf child, the complexity of sign language grammar, the need for live interaction with Deaf signers, and institutional barriers like insufficient support from early intervention services. Several parents noted that the early period after diagnosis was overwhelming and that accessible, at-home learning tools would have been particularly valuable during that time. The study also found that parents' motivation and progress varied significantly depending on their child's communication modality (sign language, spoken language with hearing aids/cochlear implants, or a combination), with parents of children using cochlear implants sometimes receiving professional advice that deprioritised sign language.
Relevance
This paper addresses an underexplored aspect of accessibility — the family communication ecosystem around deaf children. While much accessibility research focuses on technology for disabled individuals directly, this work recognises that the hearing parents are a critical point of intervention: if parents cannot communicate fluently in sign language, the child's linguistic environment is impoverished regardless of what other technologies or services are available. For accessibility practitioners, the key insight is that accessible communication is not only about providing tools to the deaf person but about building capacity in the surrounding community. The app design principles are transferable to other contexts where family members or caregivers need to learn communication strategies — augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for children with speech disabilities, for instance. The paper's limitations include the small sample size, focus on the Dutch context, and the prototype stage of the app, but the identified design requirements (sentence-level content, scenario-based organisation, integration with daily routines, slow-motion video) are broadly applicable to sign language learning tools.
Tags: sign language · deaf and hard of hearing · language learning · mobile application · family communication · children