Inclusive Deaf Education Enabled by Artificial Intelligence: The Path to a Solution

Abstract

Deaf learners in the Global South struggle to access equitable education, in particular, there are few instances where they can be facilitated in inclusive classrooms. The challenges include a lack of teachers that can sign proficiently, the unavailability of interpreters and few teachers trained in Deaf education. This paper explores the potential and challenges of an approach that aims to facilitate real-time communication between Deaf students and non-signing teachers, by combining speech and language technologies, computer vision, machine translation and 3-D avatars, all underpinned by artificial intelligence. A closed-loop solution is proposed that takes advantage advances in gesture recognition, machine translation and speech and language technologies to allow for communication between Deaf students and hearing teachers, both using their preferred medium of communication. A focus group was held with members of the Deaf community to gauge their interest and concerns about the proposed system. The results revealed a fair level of curiosity and concern. Five major themes emerged: Avatar Effectiveness and Realism; Language and Cultural Considerations; Resource and Cost Concerns; Real-time Translation Challenges and Community Involvement and Feedback. The results revealed important issues concerning bilingual-bicultural access for the hearing teacher and the need for sign language production systems to factor in the nuances of unfamiliar concepts, essentially emulating the role of Deaf Relay Interpreters.

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