Auslan and Multimodal Accessibility

Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities face persistent accessibility gaps. Auslan (Australian Sign Language) is a full language with its own grammar, timing, and facial and body components — not a set of isolated gestures.

Treating Auslan as gesture classification is scientifically and ethically wrong. Meaning depends on hands, body, face, timing, context and grammar together. Gesture-level accuracy does not imply language understanding or equivalence.

• Evaluate pose/landmark extraction (hands, body, face) as input representations.
• Explore multimodal fusion and local inference feasibility.
• Assess dataset licensing and community-governance requirements before any data work.

• Octopus Foundation. Octopus Foundation may lead community engagement, accessibility mission, participation, education, safeguarding and community governance.
• Octopus Research Institute. Octopus Research Institute may lead model research, dataset evaluation, benchmarking, methods, publication and reproducibility.
• Octopus Core. Octopus Core may contribute compute, infrastructure, local inference, privacy controls and deployment engineering.

Nothing here proceeds ahead of the Deaf community. Auslan belongs to its signers, and any data, model or evaluation involving it is gated on community leadership, informed consent and community-controlled governance — as prerequisites, not approvals sought after the fact. If the community does not lead and consent, the work does not happen.

• Nothing about us without us. Deaf-community members and Auslan-first organisations help set the questions, not just review the answers. Hearing-led research on a signed language, without that leadership, is exactly the failure mode we are trying to avoid.
• Informed, specific and revocable consent. Any contribution of signing or personal data would be under consent that is specific to a stated purpose and revocable at any time. Consent for one study is not consent for another, and withdrawal must be honoured downstream.
• Community-controlled governance and takedown. Where a corpus ever exists, its governance — who may access it, for what, and how it is retired — sits with the community, including a takedown route that is real and exercised, not nominal.
• Benefit stays with the community. The point is accessibility for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, not a dataset to extract. Value created is meant to return to the community, and outputs are not quietly rerouted into unrelated commercial use.