Supporting ASL Communication Between Hearing Parents and Deaf Children

The vast majority of deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are born to hearing parents. Due to a lack of immersive exposure to their natural language - sign language - they are at severe risk of language deprivation. In response to this challenge, this paper presents a novel computer-mediated communication platform named Tabletop Interactive Play System (TIPS). It serves as a test-bed to investigate technical and ethical solutions that enable hearing parents to use American Sign Language (ASL) during face-to-face play with their with their DHH children. The TIPS platform ofers a variety of user options in three key aspects: (1) ASL recommendation in alignment with hearing parents' real-time speech; (2) ASL display through diferent form-factors (Augmented Reality (AR) projection, tablet, and smart glasses); and (3) autonomy support to enhance users' sense of agency and trust in the system. In this paper, we will describe the system's design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation results.