Creating Signed Language Resources to Increase Access and Representation of the Deaf Community and Advance Sign Language-Centered Research

Mahajan, Shruti

Etd

Creating Signed Language Resources to Increase Access and Representation of the Deaf Community and Advance Sign Language-Centered Research

Público Deposited

Creating high-quality resources that are easily accessible in Sign Language (SL) is important and valuable to the Deaf community. It is essential to embed videos created by SL-fluent experts using high-quality cameras for producing understandable content into digital resources in a manner that ensures users can access them seamlessly on their screens and devices. Simply adding videos to an user interface design that is optimized for English leads to unsatisfactory results because language conventions and differences in intuition create varying scanning patterns and expectations regarding the information’s placement and presentation. Therefore, design choices regarding the videos and their surroundings must be made to overcome this challenge. By promoting the widespread use and availability of well-designed SL resources, this work supports increased access and representation of SL online materials for members of the Deaf community. We studied design elements that can help users navigate resources intuitively without relying on English. We developed an SL-centric survey tool that enables users to create and answer surveys in SL. This contributes to creating design paradigms and guidelines for SL interfaces. Lastly, we contribute to cultivating access to collaborative human-centered methods and research by closely reflecting on our methods and moving towards creating a guideline to carry out research in SL.

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