Sign-language recognition technology is a tool for realizing the right of communication for Deaf people. This chapter describes how the WIA standard operates on the foundation of the Korean Sign Language Act, the Anti-Discrimination Against and Remedies for Persons with Disabilities Act, the Broadcasting Act, and WCAG.
Article 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea states that "all citizens shall be assured of human dignity and worth and shall have the right to pursue happiness." The right of communication for Deaf people is recognized as a core component of this right to pursue happiness, and the Korean Sign Language Act (Act No. 18334)1) codifies its concrete content.
| Article | Content |
|---|---|
| Art. 2 | Declares KSL the public language of Korean Deaf people. |
| Art. 3 | Responsibilities of the state and local governments (KSL development and dissemination). |
| Art. 6 | Five-year KSL development master plan led by MCST. |
| Art. 9 | KSL interpreter qualification system. |
| Art. 13 | KSL education in schools for the Deaf and inclusive education. |
| Art. 15 | Creation of KSL-using environments at public institutions and broadcasters. |
| Art. 17 | Right of access to KSL information in administrative, judicial, educational, and medical domains. |
The Disability Anti-Discrimination Act (enacted 2007)2) prohibits discriminatory acts and provides remedies. Key provisions for Deaf people include the following.
Article 2 of the Welfare of Persons with Disabilities Act classifies hearing impairment into six grades. Approximately 420,000 hearing-impaired persons were registered as of 2024. Chapter 7 of the Act regulates the Deaf telecommunications relay service.
Article 69 and its implementing notification regulate mandatory broadcasting ratios for sign-language interpretation, captioning, and described video on terrestrial, general programming, and news-focused channels. KBS, MBC, SBS, EBS, National Assembly Television, and Arirang International Broadcasting all comply. The simulator Integration panel illustrates broadcast interpretation integration.
WCAG 2.23), published by the W3C, is the global web-accessibility standard. Key Deaf-relevant criteria include:
Korea's KS X ISO/IEC 40500 (KS X 6383) is the Korean-language edition of WCAG 2.2. The WIA standard requires compliance at WCAG 2.2 AA level.
The European Broadcasting Union's EBU-Tech 3370 specifies the on-screen placement, size, colour, and caption synchronization for broadcast sign-language interpretation. The interpreter window must occupy at least one sixteenth of the total screen, and caption-to-interpreter synchronization error must be within ±400 ms.
Eighteen schools for the Deaf operate nationwide: Seoul School for the Deaf (1909), Daejeon School for the Deaf, Busan Sungsim School, Incheon Sunhwa School, Gwangju Sunmyeong School, Daegu Yeonghwa School, Gangwon Provincial Dowon School, Chungbuk Cheongju Sungsim School, Chungnam Cheonan Inae School, Jeonbuk Iksan Jeil School, Jeonnam Gwangju Yeonghwa School, Gyeongbuk Andong Yeongmyeong School, Gyeongnam Jinju Hyegwang School, Jeju Yeongji School, and others.
In high-stakes domains such as medical care and law, decisions must not rely on automatic recognition alone. Review by a state-certified KSL interpreter is mandatory. The standard flags any recognition result with confidence below 0.85 as "human interpreter review recommended."
Sign-language video is sensitive information under Article 23 of the Personal Information Protection Act. Following the KISA "Sign Language Video Personal-Information De-identification Guideline" (2023), the standard requires (i) explicit consent obtained in KSL, (ii) skeleton extraction with video discard, (iii) avatar synthesis, and (iv) end-to-end encryption.
In alignment with the Disability Anti-Discrimination Act, the standard does not treat KSL as a "lower-tier" communication. Automatic captioning is a complementary tool that supports, but does not replace, human interpreters.
All interfaces (simulator, documentation, API) must comply with WCAG 2.2 AA. KSL interpretation video and Korean/English captions are provided in parallel.
| Country | Major legislation | Year enacted | Public-language status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Republic of Korea | Korean Sign Language Act | 2016 | Codified |
| United States | ADA, Section 504 | 1990, 1973 | None (effectively recognized) |
| United Kingdom | British Sign Language Act | 2022 | Codified |
| Japan | Disability Discrimination Elimination Act | 2016 | None (recognized by local governments) |
| Germany | BGG | 2002 | Codified |
| Sweden | Swedish Language Act (incl. sign language) | 2009 | Codified |
| New Zealand | NZSL Act | 2006 | Codified (official language) |
The Korean Sign Language Act is one of the world's first statutes to declare a sign language as a public language in primary legislation. The WIA standard operates in Korea on this legal foundation.
The technical specifications described in this chapter all serve the broader goal of guaranteeing the everyday communication rights of the Deaf community. Korean Sign Language is, under Article 2 of the Korean Sign Language Act, a public language with status equal to Korean, and the WIA Sign Language Recognition Standard provides the technical underpinning for this legal status.
The standard operates on the Korean national infrastructure: the Korean Association of the Deaf (KAD), the National Institute of the Korean Language (NIKL), the National Information Society Agency (NIA), the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA), the Korean Standards Association (KSA), the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS), the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA), the Korea Laboratory Accreditation Scheme (KOLAS), and the Korea Communications Agency (KCA), as well as government ministries including the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST), the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW), the Ministry of Education (MOE), the National Institute of Special Education (NISE), the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK), the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL), the Ministry of the Interior and Safety (MOIS), and the Ministry of Justice.
Broadcasters KBS, MBC, SBS, EBS, National Assembly Television, and Arirang International Broadcasting plan to adopt the standard's automatic captioning system; 5G operators SK Telecom, KT, and LG U+ apply the standard to Deaf telecommunication relay services; and AI providers Naver Clova, Kakao i, LG AI Research, Kakao Brain, and SK Telecom X publish KSL recognition APIs compatible with the standard.
The eighteen schools for the Deaf nationwide (Seoul School for the Deaf, Daejeon School for the Deaf, Busan Sungsim School, Incheon Sunhwa School, Gwangju Sunmyeong School, Daegu Yeonghwa School, Gangwon Provincial Dowon School, Chungbuk Cheongju Sungsim School, Chungnam Cheonan Inae School, Jeonbuk Iksan Jeil School, Jeonnam Gwangju Yeonghwa School, Gyeongbuk Andong Yeongmyeong School, Gyeongnam Jinju Hyegwang School, Jeju Yeongji School, Incheon Cheonghak School, Gyeonggi Ansan Jahae School, Ulsan Meari School, and Sejong Sarang School) serve as the standard's KSL education hubs.
This standard is published as an open standard under the MIT license; all simulator code, specifications, and example code are openly available at GitHub WIA-Official/wia-standards-public/tree/main/sign-language. Our hope is that this standard enables Deaf people who use Korean Sign Language to communicate more freely, and that this standard becomes the foundation for sign-language recognition standards across the Asia-Pacific region.
WIA-Official/wia-standards-public/tree/main/sign-language — A citation database of the legal, standards, and policy materials cited in this chapter is openly published in this repository.