The International Symposium on Technology and Deaf Education at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology is a bi-yearly (occurring once every two years) conference that attracts professionals, educators, technologists, and researchers who are interested in, developing for, and affected by technology for the education of deaf and hard of hearing students. This mixture of professionals leads to many interesting discussions, presentations, and exhibits with the purpose of dissemination of full research projects and best practices. This year the symposium, June 21--23, 2010, accepted 64 papers each with presentations 45 minutes long, 15 minutes of which were devoted to question and answer, and discussion. Presenters were chosen to reflect the current issues and solutions in both educational and access technologies. The symposium is also a great venue to share works-in-progress, current trends, and state of the art technology shown by 28 posters and 11 commercial exhibits. Over 300 people attended from 17 different countries including presentations by participants from Japan, Thailand, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Russia, Philippines, Poland, and Rwanda.

As part of the ongoing MobileASL project, we have built a system to compress, transmit, and decode sign language video in real-time on an off-the-shelf mobile phone. In this work, we review the challenges that arose in developing our system and the algorithms we implemented to address them. Separate parts of this research have been previously published in (Cavender et al., 2006; Cherniavsky et al., 2007; Cherniavsky et al., 2008; Vanam et al., 2009; Chon et al., 2009; Cherniavsky et al., 2009). Compression and transmission of sign language video presents unique difficulties. We must overcome weak processing power, limited bandwidth capacity, and low battery life. We also must ensure that the system is usable; that is, that the video is intelligible and the algorithms that we employ to save system resources do not irritate users. We describe the evolution of the MobileASL system and the algorithms we utilize to achieve real-time video communication on mobile phones. We first review our initial user studies to test feasibility and interest in video sign language on mobile phones. We then detail our three main challenges and solutions. To address weak processing power, we optimize the encoder to work on mobile phones, adapting a fast algorithm for distortion-complexity optimization to choose the best parameters. To overcome limited bandwidth capacity, we utilize a dynamic skin-based region of interest, which encodes the face and hands at a higher bit rate at the expense of the rest of the image. To save battery life, we automatically detect periods of signing and lower the frame rate when the user is not signing. We implement our system on off-the-shelf mobile phones and validate it through a user study. Fluent ASL signers participate in unconstrained conversations over the phones in a laboratory setting. They find the conversations with the dynamic skin-based region of interest more intelligible. The variable frame rate affects conversations negatively, but does not affect the users perceived desire for the technology. Ongoing work includes varying the spatial resolution instead of the temporal resolution, further optimization of rate-distortion-complexity, and a field study to determine usability over a long period of time in a realistic setting.

Deaf and hard of hearing students must juggle their visual attention in current classroom settings. Managing many visual sources of information (instructor, interpreter or captions, slides or whiteboard, classmates, and personal notes) can be a challenge. ClassInFocus automatically notifies students of classroom changes, such as slide changes or new speakers, helping them employ more beneficial observing strategies. A user study of notification techniques shows that students who liked the notifications were more likely to visually utilize them to improve performance.

Audio CAPTCHAs were introduced as an accessible alternative for those unable to use the more common visual CAPTCHAs, but anecdotal accounts have suggested that they may be more difficult to solve. This paper demonstrates in a large study of more than 150 participants that existing audio CAPTCHAs are clearly more difficult and time-consuming to complete as compared to visual CAPTCHAs for both blind and sighted users. In order to address this concern, we developed and evaluated a new interface for solving CAPTCHAs optimized for non-visual use that can be added in-place to existing audio CAPTCHAs. In a subsequent study, the optimized interface increased the success rate of blind participants by 59% on audio CAPTCHAs, illustrating a broadly applicable principle of accessible design: the most usable audio interfaces are often not direct translations of existing visual interfaces.

Deaf and hard of hearing students are an underrepresented group in computing and face extra challenges in university-level computing courses. This paper describes a 9-week Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing that jump-starts the academic careers of deaf and hard of hearing students and strengthens their interest in computing. Students take introductory computing and animation in a fun, supportive, accessible environment. We report on some of the problems students face and lessons we have learned about helping them overcome those problems. Through the academy, they meet other successful deaf and hard of hearing technology professionals, tour top computing companies, and display their own work to the local deaf and hard of hearing community. Students gain leadership, independent learning skills, and complete the program better prepared for a college major in computing.

For many people with hearing impairments, the degree of hearing loss is only a small aspect of their disability and does not necessarily determine the types of accessibility solutions or accommodations that may be required. For some people, the ability to adjust the audio volume may be sufficient. For others, translation to a signed language may be more appropriate. For still others, access to text alternatives may be the best solution. Because of these differences, it is important for researchers in Web accessibility to understand that people with hearing impairments may have very different cultural-linguistic traditions and personal backgrounds.

The recommendations in this article reflect current thinking on language for writing in the academic accessibility community. Certain words or phrases can (intentionally or unintentionally) reflect bias or negative, disparaging, or patronizing attitudes toward people with disabilities and in fact any identifiable group of people. Because language can convey these things, it can influence our impressions, attitudes, and even actions. Choosing language that is neutral, accurate, and represents the preference of the groups to which it refers can convey respect and integrity.

Deaf and hard of hearing students studying advanced topics in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) lack standard terminology to enable them to learn, discuss and contribute to their chosen fields. The ASL-STEM Forum enables the diverse, thinly-spread groups that are independently creating and us1ing terminology to come together using a community-based, video-enabled web resource. A common vocabulary would provide interpreters with consistent terminology and enable deaf scientists to more easily converse from a common basis. This paper discusses the implementation of the ASL-STEM Forum, describes our approach to building a community using the site, and overviews the unique opportunities it offers for observing a language developing from the bottom-up.

Web browsing is inefficient for blind web users because of persistent accessibility problems, but the extent of these problems and their practical effects from the perspective of the user has not been sufficiently examined. We conducted a study in situ to investigate the accessibility of the web as experienced by web users. This remote study used an advanced web proxy that leverages AJAX technology to record both the pages viewed and the actions taken by users on the web pages that they visited. Our study was conducted remotely over the period of one week, and our participants used the assistive technology and software to which they were already accustomed and had already configured according to preference. These advantages allowed us to aggregate observations of many users and to explore the practical effects on and coping strategies employed by our blind participants. Our study reflects web accessibility from the perspective of web users and describes quantitative differences in the browsing behavior of blind and sighted web users.

Educational technology has the potential to better include deaf and hard of hearing students in the academic mainstream. This research involves development and testing of a classroom platform for deaf and hard of hearing students to access remote interpreters and captioners, avoid visual dispersion, and facilitate interaction in the classroom.

The MobileASL project aims to increase accessibility by enabling Deaf people to communicate over video cell phones in their native language, American Sign Language (ASL). Real-time video over cell phones can be a computationally intensive task that quickly drains the battery, rendering the cell phone useless. Properties of conversational sign language allow us to save power and bits: namely, lower frame rates are possible when one person is not signing due to turn-taking, and signing can potentially employ a lower frame rate than fingerspelling. We conduct a user study with native signers to examine the intelligibility of varying the frame rate based on activity in the video. We then describe several methods for automatically determining the activity of signing or not signing from the video stream in real-time. Our results show that varying the frame rate during turn-taking is a good way to save power without sacrificing intelligibility, and that automatic activity analysis is feasible.

This paper describes the development of EyeDraw, a software system that enables children with severe motor impairments to draw pictures by just moving their eyes. EyeDraw will help these children to have creative and developmental experiences currently missing from their lives. The project demonstrates how task analysis integrated at various levels of detail, including that of the unit task as well as that of visual-perceptual and oculomotor processing, can improve eye tracking for real-time input. The project introduces refined techniques for controlling a computer with the eyes. The paper discusses the motivation for the project, previous research on eye-control of computers, how EyeDraw works, and the results of user observation studies that are currently in progress.

For many people with hearing impairments, the degree of hearing loss is only a small aspect of their disability and does not necessarily determine the types of accessibility solutions or accommodations that may be required. For some people, the ability to adjust the audio volume may be sufficient. For others, translation to a signed language may be more appropriate. For still others, access to text alternatives may be the best solution. Because of these differences, it is important for researchers in Web accessibility to understand that people with hearing impairments may have very different cultural-linguistic traditions and personal backgrounds.

Deaf and hard of hearing students experience barriers that make access to mainstream universities a challenge. Educational technology has the potential to better include these students in the academic mainstream. This paper begins by outlining historical trends in education for deaf students because understanding the unique characteristics and experiences of members of the deaf community will be crucial for successful design. We then discuss current trends in educational technology in general, especially those that will ultimately be made accessible or compatible with the needs of deaf students. Finally, this paper describes the author's proposed thesis work: the development and evaluation of a classroom platform for deaf and hard of hearing students to access remote interpreters and captionists, avoid visual dispersion, and facilitate classroom interaction.