MobileASL: Intelligibility of Sign Language Video as Constrained by Mobile Phone Technology
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For Deaf people, access to the mobile telephone networkin the United States is currently limited to text messaging,forcing communication in English as opposed to AmericanSign Language (ASL), the preferred language. Because ASLis a visual language, mobile video phones have the potentialto give Deaf people access to real-time mobile communica-tion in their preferred language.However, even today’s best video compression techniquescan not yield intelligible ASL at limited cell phone net-work bandwidths. Motivated by this constraint, we con-ducted one focus group and one user study with membersof the Deaf Community to determine the intelligibility ef-fects of video compression techniques that exploit the vi-sual nature of sign language. Inspired by eyetracking resultsthat show high resolution foveal vision is maintained aroundthe face, we studied region-of-interest encodings (where theface is encoded at higher quality) as well as reduced framerates (where fewer, better quality, frames are displayed ev-ery second). At all bit rates studied here, participants pre-ferred moderate quality increases in the face region, sacri-ficing quality in other regions. They also preferred slightlylower frame rates because they yield better quality framesfor a fixed bit rate. These results show promise for real-time access to the current cell phone network through sign-language-specific encoding techniques.
En Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA, October 23-25, 2006.