Bridging the Digital Gap for the Deaf Community

When a visitor selects text, Isharat instantly matches each word against a growing library of thousands of real, human-recorded signs and plays the correct video back — no waiting, no complicated setup. That library isn't static: new words, expressions, and sign videos are added on an ongoing basis, and we're targeting to grow real, measured sign coverage from today's 70.3% toward 80%+ as that work continues. The growth is demand-driven, not guesswork — every time a word doesn't yet have a recorded sign, the request is automatically logged and ranked by how often it comes up, giving our content team a real priority list for exactly which signs to record next.

Arabic includes words that are spelled identically but carry different meanings, and in sign language a different meaning can call for a different sign. When a word like this comes up, Isharat is built to offer visitors a quick pick-list of the candidate signs so they can choose the right one, rather than leaving them guessing. We're also actively developing context-understanding technology — teaching the system to recognize which meaning is intended directly from the sentence — one of the most significant translation-quality enhancements on our roadmap, aimed at making manual selection increasingly rare.

For the small number of words without a recorded sign yet, Isharat automatically spells them out letter-by-letter using the Arabic finger-spelling alphabet, so visitors always get a translation rather than silence. Numbers are handled automatically too — read aloud in sign for everyday numbers, and digit-by-digit for phone-number-style sequences.

Isharat's grammar engine does three things before a single video plays: it removes articles, conjunctions, and prepositions that sign language doesn't use; it reorders the sentence into natural topic-then-comment structure; and it inserts grammatical markers — a sign meaning انتهى ("finished") to mark a completed past action, or لا to carry negation.

Notice the pattern: the topic comes first (المطار, أمريكا, الطعام), then what's being said about it, then the question or tense marker at the end. Sign sequences above were confirmed with Deaf reviewers.

Shown here as a static example — the live version appears under the video inside the widget.

Those ratings do two things. They guide our translation-quality work — which sense the engine picks for an ambiguous word, how natural the sign ordering feels, and which missing signs get filmed first. And a translation marked 😕 Unclear automatically deactivates its own cached entry, so the next person to request that sentence gets a freshly generated translation rather than the one just reported as wrong.

Isharat's Egyptian sign content comes from the national Unified Sign Language Dictionary our own team developed — announced on the Egyptian Presidency's own portal, and carried out together with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Social Solidarity, and the Teachers Academy. It's in active use across virtually every Deaf school in Egypt today, and published as the educational dictionary platform (subscription required for full access), whose 10,000+ entries record each word in the several forms a learner needs to see. Isharat's translation library counts distinct entries instead — 8,700+ base words and 2,600+ idioms, one sign per meaning.

Every recorded sign was additionally reviewed and approved under a signed protocol with Egypt's Union of Deaf Associations — the review authority here is the Deaf community's own representative body, not Isharat's engineering team. Interpreters are recognized by the Egyptian government and are approved members of the Saudi Deaf Union. Sign content for the wider region is sourced from official dictionaries published by the Arab League's regional initiative (Qatar) and the United Arab Emirates.

Together, this represents the common Arabic sign vocabulary shared across Egypt and the Gulf — comparable to how Modern Standard Arabic functions as a shared reference across the Arab world's spoken dialects.