We introduce SPECTRA, a novel pipeline for personalizable sound recognition designed to understand DHH users' needs when collecting audio data, creating a training dataset, and reasoning about the quality of a model. To evaluate the prototype, we recruited 12 DHH participants who trained personalized models for their homes. We investigated waveforms, spectrograms, interactive clustering, and data annotating to support DHH users throughout this workflow, and we explored the impact of a hands-on training session on their experience and attitudes toward sound recognition tools. Our findings reveal the potential for clustering visualizations and waveforms to enrich users' understanding of audio data and refinement of training datasets, along with data annotations to promote varied data collection. We provide insights into DHH users' experiences and perspectives on personalizing a sound recognition pipeline. Finally, we share design considerations for future interactive systems to support this population.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713294
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)