Find Sign

Auslan Search Engine

[findsign]

Find Sign has a Discord Bot. Now it's a bit easier to chat about Auslan Vocab in Discord groups. If you'd like to try it out, join the Find Sign Development discord and you can add the bot to other Discord groups from there, as well as give any feedback about the site!

[findsign]

Interactive Map

You may notice the search box now has a little map of Australia on the right hand side. Click it and you can select which state you want to search in, or toggle back to all of Australia.

This is an experiment, trying to make hashtag searching more visual, accessible, and intuitive. Super keen for feedback. Do you like it? Is there anything you'd change? Come chat about it in the Find Sign Discord if you want to get involved in designing the future of this site.

[findsign]

SpreadTheSign Auslan added

Find Sign's just doubled in size! Search results now include all the Auslan videos recently added to SpreadTheSign.

Check it out! It's a super impressive effort. SpreadTheSign's Auslan collection is larger than any other site listed in Find Sign. Larger than Signbank! An incredible effort for just one person.

[findsign]

Better video quality

Better quality videos have been added. If your device supports “VP9 WebM” type of video files you should see all the videos on Find Sign more clearly and beautifully.

[findsign]

#auslan-anywhere

Starting today, Find Sign can search Auslan Anywhere! Expression Australia made this really cool app/website, great for learners, with heaps of phrase examples to show the grammar. If you haven’t already, go check out Auslan Anywhere! It’s really great! You can even request videos for how to sign different words and phrases!

[findsign]

New Feature!

You know you want to click it!

Random signs, perfect for Pictionary.

[findsign]

NAIDOC Week - Auslan Information

It’s important we support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, learn about history, Aboriginal technology, and celebrate together!

[findsign]

Check out Asphyxia’s Future Girl book: Asphyxia’s Etsy, Amazon

[findsign]

Do you wonder how many people use Find Sign?

Here’s a screenshot of the Fathom Analytics app it uses. You can see that on average about 52 people use Find Sign every day. In the past four weeks, people opened a page on the site 2,451 times.

You can also see here, how Find Sign doesn’t collect information about what you search for. It doesn’t even know how many times people search, when they open the page! There is no information about who you are, so it is very safe to search for anything, even private topics.

There is a dip in the middle, but that’s just because the analytics connection was broken for a couple of days, so it didn’t properly measure those days.

[findsign]

Welcome @latrobeuni_auslan! Check out their Instagram! It’s really good!

[findsign]

Update!

I’ve been working on updates and improving the polish of Find Sign recently.

There are four main new things:

Instagram can be included now. If Deaf people or other fluent Auslan signers would like to connect their instagram to Find Sign, it can now import videos. You could show how to sign certain ideas, or demonstrate Auslan grammar, or even share made up new signs (these must be clearly tagged so the search results can warn people!). At the moment 2 people are included. @toddslan shares made up new signs. @v.alford shows lots of different people using basic simple Auslan signs.

On the Find Sign home page, there is a new box at the bottom. It contains a list of things Find Sign’s software has recently found, that it hasn’t seen before. This box will automatically update when new videos are added to the search results. Using this, you can see when new videos are added on Auslan SignBank, or by other Deaf organisations like SignPedia, or by individuals through Youtube or Instagram.

Signbank Hashtags: Auslan Signbank has a tag system, which describes each sign’s features, both how it is sign is performed on the hands, and what topic it is about. These tags are now imported and included in Find Sign’s search system. You can read more about this and how to use it, on the updated About page on find sign.

The updated About page now lists every #hashtag in the Find Sign search system, so you can learn what tags you can search for to limit your search results to specific kinds of signs.

I hope you all enjoy the updates!

[findsign]

Moved to Sydney!

Find Sign has moved from it’s computer in Tokyo, to a computer in Sydney! It should be faster now! 😄

Please let me know, if you find problems!

[findsign]

Thanks to LJ for letting me know about a mistake. It caused search results from Auslan Signbank to have the wrong URL sometimes. The program which generates Signbank search listings should be fixed now. It will take a while to generate new files, but it should be fixed in about 6 hours. If you still see this problem tomorrow, try using the reload button in your web browser.

[findsign]

Small update to search results

The way Find Sign organises the search results has changed. It should be better now, with more relevent results higher up.

Sorry no Auslan video.

[findsign]

I made a little Siri Shortcut for Find Sign. You can use this on iPhone iOS 13 to add a Find Sign button to your Home Screen for faster searches. You can also access it via Siri verbally or via the Type To Siri accessibility option.

You can get the shortcut here: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/cea65561c42b49008483142ba60b05c5

You might need to enable “Allow Untrusted Shortcuts” in the system settings to be able to import it.

[findsign]

Hello World!

Introducing “Find Sign”, a new website which searches multiple different other websites that have Auslan signs recorded in videos. It’s an easy, fast, central location you can go whenever you’re wondering “How do I sign that in Auslan?”

Just type your query in to the box, and find sign will use the Fast Text AI translation system, originally open sourced by Facebook’s translation engineers, to understand the meaning of the words you typed in, and find signs that feature related concepts. Hopefully it’ll find a perfect sign to express your idea with, but if it doesn’t, it should at least find some related ideas if possible, that might be helpful in figuring out how to talk about that topic more vaguely or explain the idea.

But that’s not all. It’s also a community powered search engine. What I mean by that, is you’re all welcome to upload signs to youtube and send the link thru to me, and have it included in the search results, as long as the quality is decent. Things that make for a good submission: Short and to the point, well lit and clear to see, a good description, a good (ideally short) list of english words in the title, accurate use of hashtags to signify which area of australia the sign variation is used in. Submissions from Deaf people, and submissions from people affected by or connected to what the sign is about will be prioritised over overs, e.g. Autistic people are more an authority on the right way to sign Autism. Intersex people are more an authority on the sign for Intersex. People who live in Melbourne are more an authority on signs for areas of Melbourne.

If you’d like to submit some videos, send a message through tumblr and I can give some advice on the best way to do it! Hopefully that works well, but if not, I hope we can all work together constructively to find a better balance. If people are keen, I can also look in to allowing the search engine to include videos posted to Tumblr later, so you don’t have to use youtube if you prefer.

Please, check it out if you’re an Auslan user or interested in learning, consider contributing if you can find signs the search engine doesn’t have that you know. 

The site should now be live at https://find.auslan.fyi/

Much love, Admin Phoenix (a Hard of Hearing Autistic person)