ASL was my foreign language in college. I wish I remembered it better, frankly. It's definitely got to be difficult to translate technological jargon and neol

ASL was my foreign language in college. I wish I remembered it better, frankly. It's definitely got to be difficult to translate technological jargon and neologisms into ASL, much less math, where your instruction is likely highly symbolic. Probably the best you would get would be to get a lot of fingerspelling if the person doesn't understand the subject... I can definitely see how Cued Speech would work better for you. Frankly real time translation into ASL has some big difficulties because of major grammatical differences, not to mention that a fast gesture can differ in meaning from a slower one. And that's assuming they were actually using ASL for the translation, instead of some sort of pidgin. Anyway I think one of the important differences between most IM/chat and and speech is that speech is spontaneous and instant because it's serial and unbuffered. I think the closest you get in chat is Google wave, where you didn't hit enter, you typed and each letter showed up on the screen. I do wonder if even bad speech recognition, if it was real time, might not help with conversations. I really wish other IM services used real time typing, instead of requiring people to hit enter or send. Also don't assume your alone. There are probably quite a few deaf hackers, and collaboration might help bring resources like subtitled or transcribed videos to light. Anyway, I appreciate the insight. Keep kicking ass.