How to Make Captioning Services For Deaf and Hard of Hearing Visitors More Effective in Museums?

In order to improve the accessibility of the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) visitors at museums, real-time captioning using speech recognition is a very convenient communication support tool. Since viewing exhibits and captioning are both visually events, it is necessary to examine whether a DHH person can simultaneously view the exhibits while processing the textual data. This study focuses on the accessibility of guided tours in museum and discusses the problems of using captioning as communication support for DHH visitors. Results of the experiment are summarized as follows. In the scenes of looking at still images in museums, it turns out that different devices are needed for different purposes. In experiments where a moving object was presented, it was found that when the captioning was frequently updated, the user stopped watching the observation target to read the captioning. In other words, the captioning may have prevented stable and continuous observation.