Speaker: Linda Kozma-Spytek, Gallaudet University
Date: November 12th, 12-1pm
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Title: "Voice Telecommunications Accessibility for People with Hearing Loss"
Abstract:
The Technology Access Program (TAP) at Gallaudet University conducts research related to communication technologies and services, with the goal of producing knowledge useful to industry, government, and deaf and hard of hearing consumers in the quest for equality in communications. TAP has been partnering with the Trace Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Omnitor in Sweden on the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Telecommunications Access, funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, for the past 15 years. Currently, one of our primary research goals is to better understand the technical parameters that lead to effective audio-only and audio/visual telecommunications by individuals with hearing loss who use voice communication. This presentation will provide an overview of the results of five, with-in subjects experiments, which have investigated the effects of a variety of parameters including presentation mode (the addition of a video channel), video quality (video frame rate and audio-video synchrony), audio quality (codec audio bandwidth and data rate) and environment (the addition of noise) on the ability of people with hearing loss to understand spoken language during telephone use. Testing has included various dependent measures, such as speech intelligibility (% words correct for sentence material), subjective ratings of mental effort, speech quality ratings, response time and purchase intent. Directions for future research will also be discussed.
