Lloyds Banking Group is trialing a mobile app that scans financial literature and translates it via augmented reality into British Sign Language for hard-of-hearing customers.
The tool, dubbed Signly, was conceived and developed by Mark Applin, founder of Intermedia Solutions and tech charity Deafax. Having experimented with the app at its innovation labs, Lloyds is looking to pilot the technology with a larger group of customers ahead of a possible full scale roll-out.
BSL is a unique language with its own sentence structure and contains a number of key differences to both spoken English, and Signed Supported English (SSE).
The trial will apply Signly’s to both written and online texts, enabling hard of hearing and deaf customers to use BSL to understand the financial material they are being shown.
Nick Williams, Lloyds Bank’s consumer digital director says: “Alongside SignVideo, Text Relay and our interpreting service, Signly provides a new tool to make it easier to engage with the bank. Improving our services to make them simple and intuitive for all our customers is key to removing barriers of financial exclusion.”