Digital Literacy for Deaf Children

For young and emerging Deaf readers, the role of fingerspelling is important. Fingerspelling bridges ASL and English. It provides a rich gateway into ASL’s visual sign phonology for emerging readers and also strengthens children’s decoding of the English text.

Frequent fingerspelling helps children become better readers and facilitates English vocabulary growth. Deaf and hard of hearing readers who are good at fingerspelling are also good readers, and vice versa!

Our storybook apps provide all that, and more. Read on to learn about the design of our apps and our approach in supporting Deaf children’s early language acquisition and development.