Accessible System and Social Media Mobile Application for Deaf Users

Abstract

Usability, accessibility and inclusion are major concerns and have a huge impact for many people with special abilities. Specifically, people who are Deaf have a serious and unfair disadvantage in regards to different social aspects of everyday life. Explicitly, in terms of access to technology, products are stereotypically designed for hearing people. There are important parameters to consider in designing technological products for deaf people: i) providing the ability to interact using sign language, ii) the first language for many people who are Deaf is the sign language of their country and iii) one may find multiple dialects of sign language within a country. Adhering to these parameters, can alleviate barriers and impact positively the integration of the Deaf and hearing communities for a more inclusive society. This work contributes to the aforementioned from a social dimension perspective. Social media applications, e.g., WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, are the number one communication channels for people in today's fast-paced world. Even within these mainstream social media apps (MSMAs), persons who are Deaf are not provided with the rights and means to interact in their preferred way. This work supports integration of Deaf and hearing communities in MSMAs. This is done via: i) development of the Connect Deaf app that enables use of fingerspelling keyboards in 13 sign languages in MSMAs and ii) a Low-Fidelity (Lo-Fi) prototype that aims to enhance the Connect Deaf app with additional features, i.e., the ability to browse, search and edit animated (i.e. not static) GIFs in American Sign Language (ASL). This provides the full set of features offered by social media apps to Deaf end-users and their friends and family. This paper presents the ASM4Deaf system architecture, i.e., the cloud-based backend and mobile application, the technical approaches and the Lo-Fi prototypes defined and evaluated in the workshop conducted with users who are Deaf and their family and friends. Finally, it presents and analyses the results of the workshop that contributed to this work towards the definition of the final ASM4Deaf system.

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