Designing Pakistan’s first sign language dictionary
Services
Ethonography, UI/UX Design
Industry
Education
Problem we were trying to solve
With approximately 10m people in Pakistan that have hearing difficulties, the teaching and adoption of PSL is essential to create accessibility for the hearing-impaired by providing them with a medium to learn.
Family Educational Services Foundation (FESF), is a pioneer in promoting inclusive education in Pakistan, particularly for the deaf community. While FESF had already developed an extensive PSL curriculum, it was largely unavailable in a digital, interactive format that could scale effectively. So they set out to create a digital platform that would allow both students and instructors to learn and teach Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) more effectively and remotely.
Our Role
FESF partnered with Designist to create a digital platform that would allow students and instructors to learn and teach Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) through a digital dictionary.
The platform aimed to digitize the PSL curriculum, making it accessible in both urban and rural areas, with a special focus on offline functionality.
Contextual Understanding
A major part of this initiative included distributing Raspberry Pi units preloaded with the platform to schools and learning centers across Pakistan as such, we had to understand human behaviour in regards to how sign language was being taught in classrooms.
A key focus of our research was to understand the role digital tools could play in enhancing the PSL learning experience. Through classroom observations and interviews in schools in Karachi, Hyderabad and Nawabshah, we uncovered recurring pain points:
- Limited access to a comprehensive library of signs.
- Difficulty in searching for existing words efficiently.
- The need for easier ways to curate and structure content for classroom delivery.
These insights formed the foundation of the platform’s design—ensuring it directly addressed the real needs of its users.
Designing the Learning Experience
Our design goal was to create a fluid and accessible experience that didn’t rely heavily on reading or complex navigation. Key design features included:
- A visual-first interface, using expressive illustrations and intuitive iconography.
- Designed new ways of accessing words through easy to understand categories and search functions.
- Features enabling teachers to create and manage lesson plans.
- Users now had the capability to save and create play-lists for quick access to their favourite words and stories.
- Offline compatibility, optimized for Raspberry Pi deployment, ensuring functionality in areas with limited internet access.
- Ability to request or submit new PSL words to expand the PSL vocabulary.
The Impact
The 1,000+ PSL Learning Units distributed to-date in 192 schools in 90 cities have impacted the lives of 63,492 students, teachers, families and entire communities.
The social impact was acknowledged locally through an award from Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT and ITES (P@SHA) , and earned global recognition with the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Award.
