Toward a mobile service for hard of hearing people to make information accessible anywhere

• Published in: 2013 International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Software Applications pp. 1 - 5
• Main Authors: Boulares, Mehrez, Jemni, Mohamed
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-03-2013
• Subjects: Android; Animation; Assistive technology; Auditory system; Cloud Computing; Communities; Gesture recognition; Mobile communication; Sign Language; Streaming media; Virtual Reality
• ISBN: 9781467363020; 1467363022
• DOI: 10.1109/ICEESA.2013.6578389

Deaf and hard of hearing people can find it difficult to follow the rapid pace of our daily life. This problem is due to the lack of services that increase access to information. Regarding hearing impairment there is no specific solutions to make information accessible anywhere. Although this community has very specific needs related to the learning and understanding process of any written language. However, hearing impairment is an invisible disability which is quite frequent: it is estimated that more than 8% of world's population suffers from hearing loss. According to many studies reading level of hearing impaired students is lower than reading level of hearing students. In fact many deaf people have difficulties with reading and writing; they cannot read and understand all the information found in a newspaper, in vending machine to take a conveyance, in instruction leaflet etc... Mainly all visual textual information are not accessible for this category of people with disabilities. However, a number of obstacles still have to be removed to make the information really accessible for all and this is crucial for their personal development and their successful integration. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem by providing a mobile translation system using the great technological advances in smart phones to improve the information accessibility anywhere. We rely on text image processing, virtual reality 3D modeling and cloud computing to generate a real-time sign language interpretation by using high virtual character quality.