* Empower deaf people to feel like they have a shared, global language distinct from and on par with spoken languages? (but there are other sign languages besides ASL...)
* Serve people who are sighted, but both deaf and dyslexic? (Would the symbols actually help?)
* Teach people how to use sign language? (same objection as before, plus it just doesn't come across as very informative)
* Something else?
I will say that featural scripts like this are cool in general, though, and also congrats to the parties involved on getting it into Unicode.
It has a lot of the disdvantages of IPA as a practical writing system as well.
Sign languages are not the same as spoken languages used in the same countries, as is very apparent if you look at transliterations of ASL using latin glyphs, there are some standardized ways to do this but they drop a lot of information and don't have the same sentence/word structure.
There is also a long history of attempts to create notation that can record this type of language, the first for ASL being Stokoe notation, which represents hand shapes for example, but can't represent for example facial elements, and is specific to ASL, can't represent things in other sign languages.
Also, just as you can drop many IPA symbols and just get the basic set needed to represent a particular language, I guess you could use "simplified" SW ignoring the fine differences.
For instance, being able to quickly scan through a piece of text instead of having to watch it play in video form, or being able to search and index it, or providing a way to organize dictionaries.
There's no inherent problem with using the same notation scheme for different sign languages, just like we use essentially the same alphabet for English, Spanish, French, German, etc.
Of course video is more easily available now, so there are some aspects of study that may not need the ability to write things down.
However, something to keep in mind is the following: signed languages are not a signed transliteration of the local language. For example, American Sign Language is not a signed way to communicate English. It has its own grammar. Therefore, when you serialize something like ASL, you do not get back something like English.
So, you have to have a different way to serialize ASL, and this is that.
Similarly, BSL is signed throughout Britain (and I think some of the former Commonwealth?), so Welsh and Scottish "native" readers share BSL with English readers.
Now, it may not be obvious that there is a necessity for a writing system for a minority language embedded in a larger community (spoken language), but there are many uses: preservation, digital use, teaching, linguistic study...
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:American_Sign_Lang...
