A Comparative Study of the Acceptability of Signs for the Brazilian Sign Language Created in Person and Remotely

Teaching a programming language to a person who is deaf or hearing impaired (DHI) has, along with other challenges, the lack of signs to convey basic concepts in computing. This shortage of signs makes learning even harder for the DHI. The creation of signs from co-present discussions involving instructors, translators and the DHI can lead to regionalism, which might hinder their acceptance by members of other DHI communities throughout the country. A way to combat regionalism is through the asynchronous collaborative creation of signs, normally supported by web tools. But are the signs created through web discussions inferior in any way to those created via co-present discussions? This article presents a comparative study on the acceptance of signs created by both methods showing that acceptable and legitimate signs can also be produced using web discussions and the users can not distinguish from which method they come from.