MobileASL: Making Cell Phones Accessible to the Deaf Community

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.

Speaker Details

Richard E. Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971, at which time he joined the faculty of the University of Washington. In addition to his primary appointment, he is an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Linguistics. His current research interests include accessible computing, especially technology for deaf, blind, and deaf-blind people. His prior research career was in theoretical computer science. He is also currently leading education and outreach projects for students with disabilities. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. He is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow. He is a recipient of the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). He is the recipient of the 2008 Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., the only liberal arts university serving deaf people in the world.

Date:
Speakers:
Richard Ladner
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Department of Computer Science

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