Junto Ohki

Rolex Young Laureate, 2016

The world’s 70 million hearing-impaired people use 126 different languages, each with its own grammar and vocabulary. However, there are very few dictionaries to bridge the gaps between these languages. A Japanese entrepreneur, Junto Ohki, has created SLinto, an online sign-language dictionary that crowdsources signs –which are input with a special keyboard – to help deaf communities across the world converse.