View article

Sound plays an important role in both communication and contextual awareness of interesting events and information. Yet this information may not be easily accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The home environment can be modified to improve awareness with alerting systems for phones, doorbells, alarms or a baby’s crying. 1 However, other areas encountered in daily life—public spaces, stores, restaurants, streets, airports and so on—do not always provide adequate support for relaying sound-based information to the deaf. Therefore, mobile support would be very useful. Technology has thus far focused on mobile and stationary communication such as video relay on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or PC and nonmobile sound-awareness systems like phone-ring flashers. However, past work lacked a nuanced understanding of what speech and nonspeech sound awareness people value in daily life. To address this gap, we designed and evaluated a mobile sound-transcription tool for the deaf and hard of hearing, Scribe4Me. 2 It provides descriptions and transcriptions of recent speech and sounds at the press of a button. As illustrated in Figure 1, Scribe4Me runs on a PDA and records 30s of audio continuously. If the user wants more information about what happened in the last 30s, she can push a button on the screen labelled ‘what happened?’For each request, the system sends 30s of audio via general-packet radio service (GPRS) to a human transcriber, who returns a text message describing the audio content. Scribe4Me is unique in handling both speech and nonspeech audio in mobile environments. It is also the …