The ASL Maths That Stops Broadcasters Before They Start

“We would provide ASL if we could. We just cannot staff it”. Ashish Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of SyncWords, hears that line constantly, from emergency communications teams, commercial accessibility heads and content providers.

The numbers behind it

Around 1 million Americans use American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language but there are about 10,000 certified interpreters. So decisions are made long before anyone even starts talking about budgets. Decisions about what gets signed and what does not.

Earlier this year (2026), the White House told a federal court that its ASL interpreter vendor requires 24 hours notice. But tornadoes do not give 24 hours notice, neither does breaking news, or a live soccer match. The hours with no coverage are the predictable ones: overnight, at short notice, on smaller channels, and during the events people most need to follow.

What we have built with SyncWords

In July 2026, Signapse and SyncWords launched automated live ASL for US broadcast and streaming. Your encoder sends an SRT stream to SyncWords exactly as it does for captions today. Live speech recognition produces the transcript, the transcript feeds the Signapse digital signer, and the ASL translation is generated in real time.

The signer comes back two ways: composited into your video as picture in picture, or as a standalone avatar feed alongside it. Output goes back over SRT, or packaged for HLS and DASH. It sits in MPEG transport stream environments, cloud and remote production, master control and OTT delivery.

Placement is yours to control. Corner overlay, lower third, left or right side, picture in picture, full screen, or a custom branded layout with adjustable size and position. Treat the signer as another element in your graphics package.

What this changes commercially

Live ASL now runs on the same pipeline that already carries SyncWords captions, subtitles in more than 40 languages and AI voice dubbing. No new hardware, no second production chain, no separate scheduling process. Latency stays broadcast friendly.

That moves ASL from a per event booking decision to a service you can switch on across a schedule. It scales from a single town hall to a channel running around the clock. In the UK, the same technology delivers BSL, already live across National Rail.

There is a regulatory clock too. Large public entities face new ADA digital accessibility requirements in April 2027, which is turning accessibility from a compliance line into a procurement question for anyone selling into the US public sector.

Where human interpreters still belong

SyncWords and Signapse agree on this. Automated ASL does not replace human interpreters, but covers the hours that they were never going to be free for. For high stakes, nuanced or interactive settings, book a qualified interpreter. We will say the same thing on a sales call.

How the language is built

Everything the signer produces comes from recordings of qualified Deaf translators who are paid, credited and receive royalties. Deaf translators train the system and review its output. Our Deaf Advisory Board meets quarterly and paid Deaf user groups test the signing before it ships. Captions are written English, which is a second language for many Deaf viewers. ASL is a language with its own grammar and its own culture, and it deserves to be built with the people who use it.

See it running

You can book a meeting with SyncWords or book a trial with us here.

Sally Chalk, CEO, Signapse. Translating all the world's words into sign.

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