Launching the new brand positioning for a leading bank in South Africa and making people believe that ‘It can be’ whatever their dreams is, is possible. So we programmed a speech translating glove to show people that exact sentiment. This was an extra part to the campaign as budgets was stretched and understanding of South African sign language or broken sign language was not easy.

We wanted to bring the new brand positioning of ‘It Can Be to life. And really the best way to do that is to show people that something they believe can’t be done – really can be. There is multiple South African sign languages, and even the deaf community find it difficult to speak to each other. We wanted to inspire again, and with Tommy he wanted to inspire again – so we created the world’s first radio advert delivered in sign language.

What we expect and hope to build on from this campaign expression of ‘It Can be’ is the believe that in South African, whatever your dreams are – ‘It Can Be’. What really started to fuel this idea is the development of a single manual sign Language in South Africa, so that all deaf people can be heard and understood all speaking a unified sign language.

We are currently in the process/phase to reduce the twelve systems of oral sign language, to try and unify a globally understood language.

Sign language translation gloves is not a new thing, people all over the world is developing ways to make this technology more available all the time. The challenge is to code the movements of universal sign language into understandable South African manual language.

We use movement – rather the same way your phone does with virtual reality to build words, these words are expressed by an computer generated voice that speaks through a speaker attached to the gloves.