Title: Usable technology for the differently abled-hearing impairment

Authors: Chitralekha Bhat; Sunil Kumar Kopparapu

Addresses: TCS Innovation Labs – Mumbai, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Yantra Park, Pokhran Road 2, Thane (West) 400 601, Maharashtra, India ' TCS Innovation Labs – Mumbai, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Yantra Park, Pokhran Road 2, Thane (West) 400 601, Maharashtra, India

Abstract: Hearing loss poses a serious challenge to access information that are in the form of audio or video on the internet. Text subtitles or closed captioning is a popular mechanism to make the audio embedded in the videos accessible to the hearing impaired. Alternatively, a sign language interpreter may translate the audio into sign language gestures. However, these aids are either expensive or technologically infeasible. In this paper, we propose a technique to enable a person with hearing impairment see the audio. The novel assistive tool is envisioned as a visual aid for the hearing impaired to comprehend the audio contained in a video. The tool produces a speech synchronised visual lip movement sequence for a video. The lip movement sequence is then superimposed onto and displayed along with the original video. A number of experiments have been conducted to determine the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed visual aid.

Keywords: usable technology; assistive technology; hearing impaired; visual audio.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHT.2018.090285

International Journal of Humanitarian Technology, 2018 Vol.1 No.1, pp.3 - 18

Received: 22 Aug 2015
Accepted: 06 Mar 2016
Published online: 09 Mar 2018 *