Bridging the Gap: Understanding the Intersection of Deaf and Technical Perspectives on Signing Avatars
Temas
Detalles
Sign Language Machine Translation (SLMT) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance accessibility for deaf communities across various services, applications, and products. However, ethical challenges persist in the development of SLMT due to the complex nature of sign languages (SL) and the limited involvement of deaf communities in the development process. This has led to a disconnect between technology developers’ perceptions and the experiences and needs of deaf end users, which hinders the effectiveness of SLMT. To address these challenges, this chapter draws from existing literature and interviews conducted with professionals involved in SLMT implementation. We aim to foster a mutual understanding of diverse perspectives, and identify strategies to bridge potential gaps. Our findings indicate that technical and deaf community perspectives can be aligned, thus reducing the disconnect between developers and deaf end users. However, the current scenario, where deaf experts often have to collaborate with a predominantly hearing group of technology developers, presents a double bind situation for them, making it challenging to achieve a mutual understanding of the technical and linguistic complexities involved in SLMT.