Sign a four-digit PIN at a camera.
The signless / touchless thesis made into a thing you can poke at right now. 36 handshapes, in your browser, on the camera you already have. No install. No app. No microphone.
Run the demonstration.
Grant camera access, hold up the handshape for each digit, and watch your PIN appear. Works on phone or laptop.
Launch the demo → Runs in your browser. Nothing to install.What it proves.
- The premise. Most technology around us assumes you can speak. That fails a much bigger group than people usually imagine.
- The math. 7.5M Americans can't easily use their voices. 36 handshapes cover the alphabet. ~5B cameras are already deployed. Zero new science required.
- What designing for it looks like. A keypad you sign at. A drive-thru that responds to a thumb. A museum guestbook that prints your name ten feet tall.
- Where we come in. Hardware, firmware, gameplay, set design — built end to end in Frederick. Built once, run for years.
How we built it.
The demo runs entirely in the browser. An on-device recognizer trained on a small handshape dataset reads the camera feed in real time and emits one of 36 classes per frame. A short stability window suppresses jitter — you have to hold the shape for ~250ms before it commits to the PIN. The whole thing is one HTML file with no server roundtrip.
Why this matters. The classifier is small enough to run on five-year-old phones. The interaction is fast enough to feel like a keypad. The accuracy is high enough for a four-digit PIN. None of those numbers required a frontier-model API or a custom GPU. We built it as the proof point that the touchless-world thesis is shippable today, not pending some research breakthrough.
The essay it goes with.
The longer thinking behind this demo lives in the essay The case for a touchless, signless world — a five-page case for why interactive systems shouldn't assume you can speak, and what the cure looks like in practice.
The case for a touchless, signless world.
Most technology around us assumes you can speak. It doesn't have to — and the pieces to fix it are already in the room.
Interpreter
Scheduling, the interpreter app, and billing in one place — sign, spoken, captioned, and translated through the same tool, free forever for verified Deaf-owned agencies.
Where the numbers come from.
Every claim we make should be checkable — these are the sources behind the statistics and the legal context we cite across the site.