About Us

The original Signworld Team consisted of two Deaf business women, Linda Day and Tessa Padden. For four years they worked hard to establish Signworld as the premier online learning tool for British Sign Language. In the spring of 2015, ownership was transferred fully to Linda Day.

Signworld was devised and designed from the ground up to be the best sign language learning tool available online anywhere. The owners felt passionately that there was a need for a 21st century way of learning British Sign Language. They created Signworld's learning and teaching products out of more than 20 years’ experience of teaching BSL and devising successful teaching methods, using their deep knowledge of learners' needs and their excellent relationship with networks of BSL teachers across the UK.

Signworld was designed and built up from scribbles on paper to doodles on a whiteboard to lines of code in a computer. Every stage in this process, from the curriculum to online learning strategies, was based on the unrivalled combined experience of the owners. The result is a simple, beautiful and clear learning experience for our users, where everything's uncomplicated and accessible with only a few clicks. It's user-centred learning that just works as soon as you start using it.

Long before Signworld was conceived, Linda and Tessa knew the importance of a thorough learning experience, and Signworld's products reflect that. They are all integrated, meaning you can use one at a time or all of them at once. When you use more than one product, things slot in without any overlaps, following Signworld's principle of providing seamless online learning materials - seamless in itself and as something to be used in conjunction with a BSL course.

Signworld lets you learn directly by watching real BSL (you can't learn BSL from English text!) and at your own pace. You can fly through things very quickly if you're a fast worker, or be more relaxed in your learning if you like to go at your own pace. As you'd expect, it can be accessed 24/7, from anywhere that has an internet connection. That's 21st century learning - being able to plan ahead and learn at any time you want.

Everybody's learning requirements are different, and Signworld is flexible enough to meet that, with regional signs easily accessible in each lesson. No other resource has that. You can take everything you want to learn, and go through them all in bite-size, structured sections. The system is ultra-responsive - it tells you where you're going wrong in tests, keeps tabs on your progress and lets you know how well you're doing in answering test questions.

For all these breakthrough pieces of BSL-learning technology, we’ve worked closely with our technical development partners, Wired Media. They took our carefully crafted design and structure, and coded everything up to the extent that we’d better remind you to keep your browsers updated, because some of our features are so new and advanced! (But still very easy to use - that's an impressive achievement.)

Usually new concepts and technology are expensive to start with. Not with Signworld - it’s only £29.99 to get access to Level 1 for a full year, and all of our other learning products are similarly-priced. That's because Signworld's learning products are part of a wider aim: to provide cutting-edge, innovative ways of accessing British Sign Language. It's the future today - and this is only the first step.