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Sounds constantly occur around us, keeping us aware of our
surroundings. People who are deaf have difficulty maintaining an awareness of
these ambient sounds. We are exploring various ways in which we can
support increased sound awareness for people who are deaf or
hard-of-hearing. This work consists of several projects:
This project was an investigation of peripheral, visual displays to help people who are deaf maintain an awareness of sounds in the environment. We conducted exploratory design interviews and an in-lab study using implemented prototypes. Results included a set of visual design preferences and functional requirements for peripheral visualizations of non-speech audio that will help improve future applications. We then designed, implemented, and evaluated two fully functioning prototypes using sound recognition technology that embody these preferences and requirements, serving as examples for future designers and furthering progress toward understanding how to best provide peripheral audio awareness for the deaf.
We conducted a two-week field study of a mobile sound translation tool with users who are deaf. The tool enabled users to request a translation of the last 30 seconds of audio (including dialog and descriptions of environmental sounds). Contributions include the development and evaluation of a tool that provided significant value to users' ability to maintain situational awareness.
Based on our exploration of design preferences, we found that location was an important piece of information for sound awareness. We are currently exploring light-weight hardware to locate sounds in a space. With this hardware, we will implement the most successful interfaces for locating sounds according to our design interviews (project #1 above).
In a past project, our group designed a prototype of IC2Hear, a peripheral display to provide the deaf with awareness of sound in an office environment. I was not involved in this first project, but was interested in the idea of supporting sound awareness through peripheral interfaces.
Tara Matthews, Scott Carter, Carol Pai, Janette Fong, Jennifer Mankoff. "Scribe4Me: Evaluating a mobile sound transcription tool for the deaf." In Proceedings of the international conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). Newport Beach, CA, pp. 159-176, 2006.
Tara Matthews, Janette Fong, F. Wai-ling Ho-Ching, and Jennifer Mankoff. "Evaluating non-speech sound visualizations for the deaf." In Behaviour and Information Technology, 25(4):333-351, 2006.
Tara Matthews, Janette Fong, Jennifer Mankoff. "Visualizing Non-Speech Sounds for the Deaf." In Proceedings of ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility (ASSETS). Baltimore, MD, pp. 52-59, 2005.
Tara Matthews. "Scribe4Me: Evaluating a mobile sound transcription tool for the deaf" UbiComp 2006. Newport Beach, CA. (ppt | pdf)
Tara Matthews. "Visualizing Non-Speech Sounds for the Deaf." ASSETS 2005. Baltimore, Maryland. (ppt | pdf)
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. IIS - 0205644. Any opinions, findings and
conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of
the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National
Science Foundation (NSF).
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