  Automatic speech processing systems are employed more and more often in real
environments. Although the underlying speech technology is mostly language
independent, differences between languages with respect to their structure and
grammar have substantial effect on the recognition systems performance. In this
paper, we present a review of the latest developments in the sign language
recognition research in general and in the Arabic sign language (ArSL) in
specific. This paper also presents a general framework for improving the deaf
community communication with the hearing people that is called SignsWorld. The
overall goal of the SignsWorld project is to develop a vision-based technology
for recognizing and translating continuous Arabic sign language ArSL.
