This paper proposes an approach to the computer processing of deaf sign languages that uses SignWriting as the writing system for deaf sign languages, and SWML (SignWriting Markup Language) as its computer encoding. Every kind of language and document processing (storage and retrieval, analysis and generation, translation, spellchecking, search, animation, dictionary automation, etc.) can be applied to sign language texts and phrases when they are written in SignWriting and encoded in SWML. This opens the whole area of deaf sign languages to the methods and techniques of text-oriented computational linguistics.