Guidelines for Developing Social Networking Mobile Apps to Deaf Audience: a Proposal Based on User experience and Technical Issues

The use of mobile devices to access social networking apps have increased for different audiences. Guidelines have been proposed with the aims of dealing with accessibility issues. However, usually, these are general, and sometimes developers struggle to fulfil the needs of particular audiences. In this paper, we present the MobiDeaf (Mobile for Deaf) guidelines, a set of guidelines which supports the building of mobile social networking apps for deaf users. MobiDeaf was proposed considering the perspectives of user experience and technical issues. The lessons learned from two cases studies that were conducted with seven and nine deaf people respectively provided information on the user experience perspective. Mobile and accessibility guidelines and 3C model (Communication, Cooperation and Coordination) completed the underpinnings to the creation of MobiDeaf and added the technical perspective. Two mobile apps were developed with the aims of evaluating our proposal: one by applying MobiDeaf and another WGAG guidelines. Nine deaf users tried out the apps. The results revealed that the deaf participants considered the interaction on the app, which was built by using MobiDeaf, easier than the another.