Discussion-facilitator: towards enabling students with hearing disabilities to participate in classroom discussions

Abstract

Class participation plays a vital role in the learning process during classroom instruction. Deaf students often have difficulty participating in class discussions. Several studies have shown that deaf people are better able to interpret speech when they can view the lip movements of a speaker. This paper proposes an assistive device, called the Discussion-Facilitator, which aims to enable deaf students to better participate in classroom discussions. This is done by combining the speech-recognised text of the lecture with a live video stream that is zoomed-in on the lecturer's face. The student is also able to write a text response and play it on loud speakers. Nine deaf students conducted a usability test. The results show that viewing lip movements combined with the speech-recognised text of the lecturer contributed to the understanding of the lecturer's speech, and that our prototype makes the engagement of deaf students in classroom discussion more effective.