Signily: American Sign Language Keyboard App

Signily is a sign language keyboard app developed by ASLized, a nonprofit organization that produces and promotes educational materials in American Sign Language (ASL).

After seeing that emoji and GIFs have become insanely popular during the past year, ASL users long for their own set of handshapes available across the Internet. Since there is none available in Unicode or probably will take time before basic handshapes will be approved by the Unicode Consortium, Suzanne Stecker took the initiative by researching all the possibilities and began drafting ideas in 2012. She put the project on the backburner until Apple announced that they would allow custom keyboards in September 2014.

With her expertise in design and technology, Suzanne is the perfect person to lead Signily through ASLized since she has been Deaf all her life and uses ASL as her primary language. While working with the iOS programmer, they developed an extra text field for the users to type their message in ASL before copying and pasting into Apple’s standard text field, creating the final output in email, iMessage or any third-party app that supports this feature. This method is unique as a large majority of GIF-based keyboard apps allow users to copy and paste only one image at a time.

Fortunately, Signily offers instructions for both installation and usage inside the app and on their website at Dr. Raychelle Harris, a professor at Gallaudet University, raves in her partial review, “Loved how Signily was able to brilliantly get around the Unicode issue by using the copy & paste option, rather than waiting forever for Unicode to catch up with the times.”

For those who are still learning ASL, they can look up Signily’s index of what each key represents. Advanced users enjoy putting together both hands to create various signs and using some stand-alone animated handshapes to express their thoughts. There are currently three different hand colors to choose from: white, tan and brown and the Signily team hinted they will throw in more someday.

Signily is currently available for 99 cents on the App Store and will release another version for Android soon.