Sensory substitution or enhancement techniques have been proposed to enable deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) people to listen to and even compose music. However, little is known about how such techniques enhance DHH people's music experience. Since deafness is a spectrum -- as are DHH people's preferences and perceptions of music -- a more situated understanding of their interaction with music is needed. To understand the music experience of this population, we conducted social media analyses, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in the deaf and hard of hearing Reddit communities. Our content analysis revealed that DHH people leveraged sign language and visual/haptic cues to feel the music and preferred familiar, non-lyrical, instrument-heavy, and loud music. In addition, hearing aids were not customized for music, and the visual/haptic techniques developed were not widely adopted by DHH people, leading to their suboptimal music experiences. The DHH community embodied mutual support among music lovers, evidenced by active information sharing and Q&A around music and hearing loss. We reflect on design justice for DHH people's music experience and propose practical design implications to create a more accessible music experience for them.
Advances in tactile-audio feedback technology have created new possibilities for deaf people to feel music. However, little is known about deaf individuals' perception of musical emotions through vibrotactile feedback. In this paper, we present the findings from a mixed-methods study with 16 profoundly deaf participants. The study protocol was designed to explore how users of a backpack-style vibrotactile display perceive intended emotions in twenty music excerpts. Quantitative analysis demonstrated that participants correctly identified happy and angry excerpts and rated them as more arousing…
Real-time captioning is a useful technique for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) people to talk to hearing people. With the improvement in device performance and the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR), real-time captioning is becoming an important tool for helping DHH people in their daily lives. To realize higher-quality communication and overcome the limitations of mobile and augmented-reality devices, real-time captioning that can be used comfortably while maintaining nonverbal communication and preventing incorrect recognition is required. Therefore, we propose a real-time caption…
Understanding livestream platforms' accessibility challenges for minority groups, such as people with disabilities, is critical to increasing the diversity and inclusion of those platforms. While prior work investigated the experiences of streamers with vision or motor loss, little is known about the experiences of deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) streamers who must work with livestreaming platforms that heavily depend on audio. We conducted semi-structured interviews with DHH streamers to learn why they livestream, how they navigate livestream platforms and related challenges. Our findings revea…
Deaf and hard of hearing individuals regularly rely on captioning while watching live TV. Live TV captioning is evaluated by regulatory agencies using various caption evaluation metrics. However, caption evaluation metrics are often not informed by preferences of DHH users or how meaningful the captions are. There is a need to construct caption evaluation metrics that take the relative importance of words in a transcript into account. We conducted correlation analysis between two types of word embeddings and human-annotated labeled word-importance scores in existing corpus. We found that norma…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Google（谷歌）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Recent advances have enabled automatic sound recognition systems for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users on mobile devices. However, these tools use pre-trained, generic sound recognition models, which do not meet the diverse needs of DHH users. We introduce ProtoSound, an interactive system for customizing sound recognition models by recording a few examples, thereby enabling personalized and fine-grained categories. ProtoSound is motivated by prior work examining sound awareness needs of DHH people and by a survey we conducted with 472 DHH participants. To evaluate ProtoSound, we characteri…
Ferhat Abbas Setif 1 University（费尔哈特·阿巴斯塞提夫第一大学）；Faculty of Sciences（理学院）；LRSD
Advances in NLP, knowledge representation and computer graphic technologies can provide us insights into the development of educational tool for Deaf people. Actual education materials and tools for deaf pupils present several problems, since textbooks are designed to support normal students in the classroom and most of them are not suitable for people with hearing disabilities. Virtual Reality (VR) technologies appear to be a good tool and a promising framework in the education of pupils with hearing disabilities. In this paper, we present a current research tasks surrounding the design and i…
Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) audiences have long complained about caption qualities for many online videos created by individual content creators on video-sharing platforms (e.g., YouTube). However, there lack explorations of practices, challenges, and perceptions of online video captions from the perspectives of both individual content creators and DHH audiences. In this work, we first explore DHH audiences' feedback on and reactions to YouTube video captions through interviews with 13 DHH individuals, and uncover DHH audiences' experiences, challenges, and perceptions on watching videos cr…
