Arabic
Sign Language.

About ArSL

Arabic Sign Language refers to a family of closely related sign languages used across the Arab world. Egyptian Arabic Sign Language (ELASL or Egyptian ArSL) is the most widely documented and standardized variant, used by an estimated 1 million Deaf Egyptians. Like ASL, it is a fully developed natural language with its own grammar independent of spoken Arabic.

Significant variation exists across countries — Lebanese Sign Language, Saudi Sign Language, and Jordanian Sign Language share vocabulary but differ in regional signs. Together currently focuses on the Egyptian variant, which has the most available training data, with plans to expand to Gulf and Levantine variants.

Together's ArSL model

The ArSL model uses a CNN-GRU architecture: ResNet-18 extracts per-frame spatial features from the 21-keypoint hand landmark set; a 2-layer GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) models temporal dependencies across a 20-frame window. GRU was chosen over LSTM for lower parameter count at the same sequence length, important for the smaller ArSL dataset size.

Dataset & training

The ArSL model was trained on a proprietary dataset of 3,000+ video clips spanning 20 common Egyptian ArSL signs, recorded across 8 signers in varied home and studio lighting conditions. Data augmentation included horizontal flip (mirroring), time-warping ±20%, and Gaussian noise on landmark coordinates.

Training ran for 40 epochs on a single A100 GPU. The model was exported to ONNX and converted to a browser-runnable format via ONNX.js. Future work includes expanding to 100+ classes and incorporating NMM feature channels.

RTL support & Arabic UI

The Arabic dashboard (/dashboard?lang=ar) sets dir="rtl" and lang="ar" at the HTML root, and uses CSS logical properties throughout. All layout — sidebar position, text alignment, icon mirroring — adapts automatically without JavaScript. Font rendering uses the Thmanyah Sans family, which includes full Arabic glyph coverage.