Accessible Multimodal Web Pages with Sign Language Translations for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a sign language interpreter module (SLIM), which delivers transparent sign language videos to deaf and hard of hearing users. Since their first language is the sign language, they rely on the visual modality with some speech input. Therefore in addition to text and images, a video of sign language interpreter should be provided. The SLIM system uses layers for exposing videos over existing Web pages, which preserves the layout structure. Our evaluation study has shown that such a system is highly acceptable by deaf and hard of hearing users. Therefore our proposal is to enhance the Web content accessibility guidelines, by adding an additional multimodal aspect for presenting existing Web information with transparent videos for deaf and hard of hearing users.