Under the consortium leadership of Fincons Group, HFC has been working on the CONTENT4ALL project for the last three years together with the research institutions University of Surrey and Fraunhofer HHI, the TV broadcaster VRT and the media company SwissTXT. The project was co-funded by the European Commission (grant nr. 762021). The aim of the project was to test technologies and algorithms that facilitate the production of sign language content for television broadcasters, in order to provide more content for the Deaf.
In the project, HFC was responsible for the user research. We applied user-centered design methods in the different phases of the project – from requirements analysis to the evaluation of virtual sign language interpreters. Find out more about our experiences and selected results in two recent publications [1, 2].
The pandemic also made it difficult for us to interact directly with users. We met this challenge with an expanded portfolio for accessible online surveys, which was also very well received by the survey participants. We published our insights and challenges from the development of accessible questionnaires with a fun factor in the form of a guideline paper [3] . The project has helped us to make further progress in scientific, ethical and interdisciplinary terms. We hope that we have helped to take another step forward in accessible media design.
[1] Böhm, S. (2021). Do you know your user group? Why it is essential to put your user-requirements analysis on a broad database. Universal Access in the Information Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-021-00805-3
[2] Upadrasta V., Oehme A., Böhm S. (2020) User-Centred Design for Accessibility in Media Content – Sign Language and Virtual Signer. In: Stephanidis C., Antona M., Gao Q., Zhou J. (eds) HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Papers: Universal Access and Inclusive Design. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12426. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60149-2_11
[3 ]Oehme A., Upadrasta V., Kotsch P. (2020) Development of a Multilingual Questionnaire for the Deaf Community – Guidelines and Challenges. In: Stephanidis C., Antona M., Gao Q., Zhou J. (eds) HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Papers: Universal Access and Inclusive Design. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12426. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60149-2_9