The New Zealand Sign Language Dictionary is a tool developed by the Victoria University Deaf Studies unit as a reference tool for the NZSL community. The website contains many resources for learners of NZSL - an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand. There is a large database of video demonstrations of NZSL words, by themselves and also in usage examples. Sign videos are searchable by their English or Maori word, or by sign features, such as hand shape and location.
Rabid has done multiple pieces of work on the NZSL Dictionary since its conception, the most recent chunk of which was in early 2015. We carried out a significant upgrade to the website, taking it to the most up to date versions of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and making a range of improvements to the search results display.
The NZSL Dictionary is a large non-profit project and has had many people contribute to different aspects of it over the years, such as Dave Moskovitz, 3Months and various staff members at VUW. Rabid is excited to have been involved with this project, and coordinating its release into the open source community in August.
