Si Chen
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign , Champaign, Illinois, United States
We present a group autoethnography detailing a hearing student's journey in adopting communication technologies at a mixed-hearing ability summer research camp. Our study focuses on how this student, a research assistant with emerging American Sign Language (ASL) skills, (in)effectively communicates with deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) peers and faculty during the ten-week program. The DHH members also reflected on their communication with the hearing student. We depict scenarios and analyze the (in)effectiveness of how emerging technologies like live automatic speech recognition (ASR) and typing are utilized to facilitate communication. We outline communication strategies to engage everyone with diverse signing skills in conversations - \textit{directing visual attention}, \textit{pause-for-attention-and-proceed}, and \textit{back-channeling via expressive body}. These strategies promote inclusive collaboration and leverage technology advancements. Furthermore, we delve into the factors that have motivated individuals to embrace more inclusive communication practices and provide design implications for accessible communication technologies within the mixed-hearing ability context.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642017
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)