Rybena: a java R&D project boosting the DIGITAL INCLUSION of INDIVIDUALS with Special Needs, Through Mobile Communication.

INTRODUCTION

According to the 2000 census carried out by the IBGE – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), there are 5,685,956 individuals with hearing impairment in Brazil. The WHO (World Health Organization) estimates that 3.5% of the Brazilian population present some light-to-severe degree of deafness. This population includes the oral deaf (who do not use sign language) and the non-oral deaf (who use LIBRAS1 or other signal languages to communicate). On April 24, 2002, the Brazilian President and the National Congress passed Law 10436 recognizing LIBRAS as the official means of communication and expression for the deaf community (AJA, 2004).
The theme has been addressed by other research groups in Brazil (Costa, 2001; Matuzawa, 2002; Crespo, 2003; Franco, 2003). The FALIBRAS project (Silva, 2003), which proposes an architecture for a virtual sign language representation and training, deserves a special mention.
The aforementioned data and a widespread feeling that a large number of people are interested in contributing to reduce the digital divide were the social motivations to start the project. From a technical viewpoint, the environments proposed herein are the result of a coordinated effort of groups interested in the subject. On one hand are the projects developed by the Information Technology Department of the Federal University of Alagoas: graW (Leite, 2002), which proposes an e-Learning platform, and MATHEMA (Costa, 1995, 1998, 2002), which proposes an architecture for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. On the other hand, is the project developed by the DFJUG (Brasilia Java Users Group, 2004), which develops the JavaS (Java for the Deaf) Program for the purpose of training the deaf in order to place them on the computer programming market. The first task was to develop multimedia CD’s where the deaf described in oral language and in LIBRAS the various difficulties they had to face in their lives. They described how having a cell phone helped them overcome such difficulties while not having a cell phone available at a particular moment put them in difficult situations.
The Rybena project, developed by the DFJUG, represents the effort of a community interested in the digital inclusion of individuals with special needs, particularly the deaf and blind communities. This justifies the name of the project (Rybena stands for "communication" in Xavante, a Brazilian native language). The core team set up to develop the Rybena project consists of Java developers, all social volunteers. The code released so far can be downloaded for free from https://rybena.dev.java.net, licensed under the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) License.

introduction | content | the project | current situation | final remarks