Hi, I'm Ping Liu.
Today, Jazz Ang and I will present our work titled: "In this online environment,
we're limited" - Exploring Inclusive Video Conferencing Design for Signers
on behalf of our coauthors Emma McDonnell and Sarah Coppola.
American Sign Language (ASL) is the Deaf community's
primary language, and it is an independent visual-spatial language
that shares no grammatical similarities to English.
ASL is centered on Deaf culture and identity.
Freelance community ASL interpreters traditionally work in-person.
However, they've had to shift their work to unfamiliar
remote interpreting environments due to the pandemic.
Existing assistive technology for DHH
signers tend to center on automating sign language interpretation.
This means the solutions force adoption of hearing society's
dominant language rather than promoting equitable
participation for signers.
As the previous slides mentioned,
the prior work has a very limited understanding of real-time
computer-mediated ASL communication through interpreters,
and it does not specifically target signers and their unique requirements
for inclusive interaction experience design.
Similarly, little is known about freelance
community ASL interpreters use of video conferencing platforms.
We seek to fill a gap in literature, and this led us to
two guiding research questions.
The first question is
what access barriers do signers face in consuming information,
communicating and collaborating on video conferencing?
The second question: What design opportunities exist for video
conferencing platforms to facilitate a signer-inclusive communication environment?
We conducted a remote interview protocol designed
to ensure our research was accessible for deaf and hard of hearing signers.
Because the prior accessibility research highlighted how existing
remote research methods were designed for the hearing community
Two designated ASL interpreters were hired to interpret for all sessions
to ensure consistency and familiarity with the nuances of this research.
And we recruited ten participants for two sets of pilot studies.
Finally, we made key adaptations for the study after validating
our protocol for this presentation will share the top three today.
The first
establish communication rules for the co-design workshops
to avoid multiple signers signing at the same time,
also a one to one ratio of d/Deaf participants to research interpreters.
So the research interpreters do not feel visually and cognitively
overwhelmed while tracking multiple signers at the same time,
and the third, one of the hearing researchers acts as a design assistant.
Digitally sketching on a tablet in real time while participants
described their ideas.
Our screener was sent to the d/Deaf and interpreter communities
via email lists, snowball sampling and social media posts.
We selected eight d/Deaf signers who prefer communicating
with ASL primarily and eight freelance ASL interpreter participants
who had been working in-person before COVID.
We first conducted a 60-minute interview
with individual participants to understand their video conferencing experience.
Then we conducted a 90-minute workshop
with four groups of participants to understand their unique needs.
Lastly, we conducted reflexive thematic analysis and visual analysis of our data.
And Jazz will take
over and move forward with the presentation.
Thanks, Ana.
So our participants have shared accessibility barriers
in videoconferencing use that we categorized into these four categories.
For this presentation,
we will focus on the first two findings: Consuming information and Communicating.
We will also share design recommendations generated from these workshops
that aim to make videoconferencing platforms more accessible for signers.
So let's start off with the first, Consuming information.
So one of the top recurring themes that were reinforced by signers and interpreters
is the difficulty in locating signers in videoconferencing platforms.
D1 explained that when there are more people in the room,
they would have to swipe screens to get a view of out of people
and signers like D3 shared that: "I'm not sure who's signing,
I'm not sure who's talking."
And the delay in locating signers have cost participants like Interpreter 10
to miss information, information that should have been interpreted
to their clients. D4 often like to look at a person who is making
a comment to capture non-manual markers (NMMs) such as facial expression.
However, because of how the thumbnails are arranged, D4 also said that:
"..when I look at that person,
then I miss
the next part of the interpreter message because I'm not looking at the interpreter
at that moment."
So the
next theme is the difficulty comprehending science and visual cues.
Many realize that signing in the 2D plane have limited their
signing space to articulate their message clearly.
one example is the inability to use body positioning
to convey important ASL grammatical expressions.
D2 explained that videoconferencing took away the ability to use body shift
for clarity as everyone is randomly laid out on a 2D space
while hearing people can assume the listener's understanding
through verbal and nonverbal backchannel feedback.
Signers also explain that they have to rely
on a single source of feedback, which is nonverbal,
and it's a lot of jumping around and it takes a lot of effort.
So one of the design ideas is "Grouped videos".
In the sketch, our participants imagined the ability to create
private groups of signers and interpreters so that if the screens are rearranged
or if they get sent to breakout rooms, D16 said that: "the interpreter
moves with me, instead of getting lost in the shuffle of the screens."
And then next, we'll share the themes
under "Communication". Signers have described difficulties trying
to get the attention of other signers because existing platforms
are designed to identify participation through audio.
D5 summarized it well, saying that "hearing people just hear something
and they're able to recognize that someone's getting the attention."
However, "deaf people don't have similar access".
Also, videoconferencing platforms do not automatically identify
active signers,
which can cause interpreters to overlook signers
and D2 recollected an experience where they were signing.
And it was dead silent in the room
and realized that an interpreter actually didn't see that they were trying
to make a comment.
Interpreters often ask signers to clarify the intent, but this back-and-forth
also becomes difficult on video conferencing platform.
This also increases their struggle to interject a conversation online.
One of the signers also shared how often they get overstep by others
and then answer the question before they could even get their interpreters' attention
and interject.
So, one of the
design ideas is to have non-auditory means to get signers' attention privately.
D16 wanted "some buttons to push to get [others'] attention" and,
D1 said that having it "pop up on my screen, if that's possible."
So as we look to a world where video conferencing remains a mainstay of work,
education and social life, we hope that future work can help
shape a medium that more fully supports visual communication.
First, future work can explore creating and evaluating prototypes
based on the design opportunities highlighted by our participants.
Since the scope of our research is within commercially-used videoconferencing
platforms, future work can investigate if the insights and recommendation
can be extended to other remote interpreting settings.
And lastly, it would be valuable for future research to study
the potential impact of videoconferencing-mediated communication on young people
whose linguistic foundation in sign language is being built via
a two-dimensional medium.
With that, thank you so
much for staying with us to the very end and feel free to ask us any questions.
Thank you.