On How Deaf People Might Use Speech to Control Devices
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Raja Kushalnagar, Ting-Hao Huang, Juan Pablo Flores, Saiph Savage · 2017
Smart devices connected to the Internet are proliferating.To reduce costs of devices that havetraditionally been inexpensive(toasters, microwaves, printers, etc), manyof these devices have chosen to use a speech interface rather than a visual one. This transition has been hastened by the increasing capabilities of speech interfaces,exemplifiedbyproducts likeAmazon Echo and Apple'sSiri.A consequence of these products moving to voice control is that people who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) may be unable to use them. In this paper, we briefly introduce two technical approaches we are pursuingfor enabling DHH people to provide input to these devices: (i) human computationworkflows for understanding "deaf speech," and (ii) mobile interfaces that can be instructed to speak on the user's behalf.