Towards Communication and Information Access for Deaf People

• Main Authors: Edwin Blake, William Tucker, Meryl Glaser
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists 2014-10-01
• Series: South African Computer Journal
• Subjects: Assistive Technology; Authoring Tools; Co-design; Health Care; Information and Communications Technology for Development; International Computer Drivers Licence; Mobile Computing; Pharmacy.
• Online Access: http://sacj.cs.uct.ac.za/index.php/sacj/article/view/236

In tightly circumscribed communication situations an interactive system resident on a mobile device can assist Deaf people with their communication and information needs. The Deaf users considered here use South African Sign Language and information is conveyed by a collection of pre-recorded video clips and images. The system was developed according to our method of community-based co-design. We present several stages of the development as a series of case studies and highlight our experience. The first stage involved ethnographically inspired methods such as cultural probes. In the next stage we co-designed a medical consultation system that was ultimately dropped for technical reasons. A smaller system was developed for pharmaceutical dispensing and successfully implemented and tested. It now awaits deployment in an actual pharmacy. We also developed a preliminary authoring tool to tackle the problem of content generation for interactive computer literacy training. We are also working on another medical health information tool. We intend that a generic authoring tool be able to generate mobile applications for all of these scenarios. These mobile applications bridge communication gaps for Deaf people via accessible and affordable assistive technology.