MobileASL: Making Cell Phones Accessible to the Deaf Community

Опубликовано 7 сентября 2016, 16:43

Video phones are quickly replacing TTYs as the preferred method of communicating from home and afar in the Deaf community. Current video phone technology uses the broadband internet and not the low bandwidth cell phone network.  In addition, video phones require significant computer processing power to compress and decompress video in real time.  It is a technological challenge to provide video phone capability on the low bandwidth cell phone network and with the limited processing power of cell phones.  The MobileASL project at the University of Washington is trying to meet this challenge.  The new video compression standard H.264 has the capability to compress video at half the bandwidth of the current standards.  The open source x264 implementation of H.264 has the potential to compress video on a cell phone in real time.  In this NSF sponsored project, x264 is being implemented on a cell phone with the Window Mobile platform using techniques to maximize the intelligibility of ASL. A number of user studies with people fluent in ASL have helped to determine what features of compressed video make the ASL most intelligible.  Focus groups of people fluent in ASL have informed the user interface design.  The research group has several fluent signers including one Deaf student.  In this talk, progress on the MobileASL project will be described.