About Fingerspell

Fingerspell helps you practise the 26 letters of the American Sign Language (ASL) manual alphabet at home, with live feedback from the camera on your hand shape. J and Z are checked with their movement paths as well. Fingerspelling is the part of ASL used for names, places and words that don't have a sign yet.

ASL is a language: please learn it from Deaf people

• ASL is a complete language, with its own grammar, and the language of the Deaf community in the US and parts of Canada. Fingerspelling is one part of it, used for proper names, technical terms and words with no sign yet.
• This app is a practice aid, not a teacher. It can tell you roughly whether your hand is in the right shape. It can't teach you the smooth, fast flow of real fingerspelling, facial expression, grammar or culture.
• Watch Deaf signers. Every letter links to fingerspelling references. For real learning, find videos by Deaf signers and, better, a class taught by a Deaf instructor: your fees support Deaf teachers, and you'll learn far more than any app can show.
• Letters vary. Different regions and families shape some letters slightly differently, and fast fingerspelling blurs shapes together. If a video shows a slightly different version, that's normal: follow the people you'll sign with.

Learn more

Fingerspelling and ASL

These links open other websites in a new tab. Fingerspell isn't affiliated with any of them and sends them nothing.

How it works

• Your browser runs two small on-device models (Google's open-source MediaPipe): one finds the 21 joints of each hand, the other finds your face and shoulders.
• For each letter, simple rules check the hand shape (which fingers are straight, bent or touching, measured as ratios of 3D joint distances). For J the app also checks that your pinky tip travels down and hooks; for Z that your index tip traces the three-stroke Z path.
• The hand-shape rules follow the same engine as the Little Hands baby-sign app. For Fingerspell, every letter's rule was checked against the app's own reference hand diagrams: each letter's diagram passes its own rule, and the other 25 letters' diagrams are rejected (J and I, and Z and D, share a hand shape and are told apart by their movement instead). It's still an approximation: lighting, camera angle and different hands can confuse it, and close pairs like M/N, U/V and E/O need care.

Privacy

• Your camera picture never leaves your device. It is analysed in your browser frame by frame and immediately discarded. Nothing is recorded, uploaded or shared.
• No accounts, ads, cookies, analytics or trackers. The app loads nothing from other websites: the models and code are served from this site, and a security policy blocks connections anywhere else.
• Stored on your device only: which letters you've practised, your settings, and whether you've seen the welcome message, in your browser's local storage. Clear it any time in Settings → Clear progress, or by clearing this site's data in your browser.
• Offline copy: after your first visit, your browser keeps a copy of the app so it works offline. Clearing site data removes it.
• The camera is only on while you're practising. It turns off when you go back to the letter list, press “Turn off”, or switch to another tab.
• Hosting: like any website, the server that delivers the app's files may keep standard technical logs (such as IP addresses) of those downloads. The app itself sends nothing.
• Reference links go to other websites, which have their own privacy policies.

Disclaimer

• Fingerspell is an educational tool for at-home practice. It is not medical advice. It doesn't teach ASL grammar, facial expression or Deaf culture: learn those from Deaf teachers.
• The camera feedback is automated and approximate. It can mark a letter as correct when it isn't, or miss a correct letter. Use the linked references as the authority.
• The letter descriptions follow ASL fingerspelling as commonly taught; some letters have regional variants, and fast fingerspelling naturally simplifies shapes.
• The app is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind.

Accessibility

• Everything works with a keyboard. Feedback is announced to screen readers, and animations follow your device's “reduce motion” setting. Sound and confetti can be turned off in Settings.
• The live check depends on a camera and on seeing your hand. If that doesn't work for you, the diagrams, written steps and reference links still work on their own.

Credits

• Hand and body tracking: MediaPipe Tasks Vision and its hand landmarker and pose landmarker (lite) models, by Google, under the Apache License 2.0. A copy of the licence is included with the app.
• Hand-shape diagrams: nine letters use hand landmarks measured on a public ASL alphabet photo dataset (Hugging Face: Marxulia/asl_sign_languages_alphabets_v03); the other seventeen are reference diagrams constructed from those shapes. No photos are included in the app.
• Reference links: ASL University (Lifeprint) and Handspeak, linked, not embedded.
• Built with the on-device gesture-tutor engine from the Little Hands app.

Fingerspell version 1.0.0