Good signers, mediocre app – The ASL App Review

The signers do a good job. However, the app itself is dot very well organized and makes it hard to learn from. I’m just starting to learn and there are lots of pieces here that would be useful, ABCs, for example. There are even different ways of viewing the ABCs - just the hand, the hand with the person’s shoulder (to see more of the arm movement for certain letters), or the hand and the face. The problem is that they go through the entire alphabet in one go, you can’t pick a single letter to practice. Furthermore, if you want to have it repeat a certain letter it repeats the entire scene, back to A again. And there’s no “pause” button. This makes learning very frustrating. The topic based sections are also well signed, but again suffer from navigation problems - there’s no way of seeing a list of all phrases in a section, you have to page through each one at a time. I do like the fact there’s a turtle / slow mode which affects all videos, but it isn’t clear that when you play a video and want to replay it that you must then click the turtle button, not the regular repeat button. In short, the UI needs a lot of work to be usable, and I hope some day it will be. Until then, I’ll be looking for another app.
Review by DamienMcKenna on The ASL App.