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Accessibility perspectives on enabling South African sign language in the South African national accessibility portal

Published: 20 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Persons with disabilities are often marginalised from economy and society due to the lack of access to disability related information and services. Through the use of assistive technologies access to the information and services can often be obtained e.g. a visually impaired user using a screen reader. The Deaf however, cannot use such technology to break the barrier because of differences in literacy and comfort with written material. The Deaf thus requires another intervention to improve their access to information and services. One such mechanism is by embedding animated Sign Language in Web pages. This paper analyses the effectiveness and appropriateness of using this approach by embedding South African Sign Language in the South African National Accessibility Portal. Through experiments, user evaluations and web-metrics it is found that such techniques can improve the accessibility for Deaf users in experimental conditions. However, real world pervasiveness will be limited because of practical concerns such as the difficulty to create and maintain animated Sign Language and bandwidth constraints that impact on users' browsing experience.

References

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D. Aarons and M. Glaser. A Deaf Adult Literacy Collective. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, (34):1--18, 2002.
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L. Coetzee and I. Viviers. Accessibility evaluation of the Accessible Technology Platform (ATP). Technical Report NAP--2007/003, Intelligent Environments for Independent Living, Meraka Institute, Pretoria, South Africa, September 2007.
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L. Coetzee and I. Viviers. Accessibility Observations of Visually Impaired Users using the South African National Accessibility Portal. In P. and M. Cunningham, editors, IST-Africa, Windhoek, Namibia, May 2008.
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M. Greeff, L. Coetzee, R. Alberts, and H. Easton. Evaluating an interactive voice response system for persons with disabilities. In 2nd CSIR Biennial Conference, Pretoria, South Africa, November 2008. ISBN: 978-0-7988-5573-0.
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M. Greeff, L. Coetzee, and M. Pistorius. Usability Evaluation of the South African National Accessibility Portal Interactive Voice Response System. In Riding the Wave of Technology Proc. SAICSIT, pages 76--85, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, October 2008.
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I. Mohlamme and S. Nhlapo. Thibologa Sign Language Institution. http://www.thibologa.co.za. Accessed March 9, 2009.
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National Accessibility Portal Initiative. http://www.napsa.org.za. Accessed March 9, 2009.
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National Accessibility Portal. http://www.napsa.org.za/portal. Accessed March 9, 2009.
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G. Olivrin. Is Video on the Web for Sign Languages? In W3C Video on the Web, 2007.
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M. Papadogiorgaki et al. Synthesis of virtual reality animation from sign language notation using MPEG-4 body animation parameters. In ICDVRAT, Thermi-Thessaloniki, GR, 2004.
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V. Sutton. SignWriting: Sign Language Transcription. The Center For Sutton Movement Writing, Inc., California, USA, September 2006.
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H. Thomas et al. Animating Sign Language: The eSIGN Approach. IST program EU FP5: Essential sign language information on government networks, EU, September 2003.
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L. van Zijl and G. Olivrin. South African Sign Language Assistive Translation. In Assistive Technology. Uni. Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2008.
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Cited By

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  • (2019)Usability of Virtual Learning Environments for Deaf Users: A Systematic Review of Literature2019 First International Conference on Digital Data Processing (DDP)10.1109/DDP.2019.00016(27-32)Online publication date: Nov-2019
  • (2010)Avaliando modelos de interação para comunicação de deficientes auditivosProceedings of the IX Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.5555/1999593.1999616(193-196)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2010

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cover image ACM Other conferences
W4A '09: Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)
April 2009
189 pages
ISBN:9781605585611
DOI:10.1145/1535654
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • The Mozilla Foundation
  • Google Inc.
  • Microsoft: Microsoft
  • Zakon Group

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. South African national accessibility portal
  2. South African sign language
  3. accessibility
  4. deaf
  5. internet
  6. web

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  • Research-article

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W4A '09
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  • Microsoft

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Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Usability of Virtual Learning Environments for Deaf Users: A Systematic Review of Literature2019 First International Conference on Digital Data Processing (DDP)10.1109/DDP.2019.00016(27-32)Online publication date: Nov-2019
  • (2010)Avaliando modelos de interação para comunicação de deficientes auditivosProceedings of the IX Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.5555/1999593.1999616(193-196)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2010

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