"It's Not an Issue of Malice, but of Ignorance"

Abstract

As video conferencing (VC) has become necessary for many professional, educational, and social tasks, people who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) face distinct accessibility barriers. We conducted studies to understand the challenges faced by DHH people during VCs and found that they struggled to easily present or communicate effectively due to accessibility limitations of VC platforms. These limitations include the lack of tools for DHH speakers to discreetly communicate their accommodation needs to the group. Based on these findings, we prototyped a suite of tools, called Erato that enables DHH speakers to be aware of their performance while speaking and remind participants of proper etiquette. We evaluated Erato by running a mock classroom case study over VC for three sessions. All participants felt more confident in their speaking ability and paid closer attention to making the classroom more inclusive while using our tool. We share implications of these results for the design of VC interfaces and human-the-the-loop assistive systems that can support users who are DHH to communicate effectively and advocate for their accessibility needs.