Improving accessibility of lectures for deaf and hard-of-hearing students using a speech recognition system and a real-time collaborative editor

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to experiment the usability of a speech recognition system to help deaf and hard-of-hearing students to understand the lesson inside the classroom by subtitling the speech of the professor in live. The proposed solution is to repeat the professor's speech in a microphone plugged to a notebook with a speech-to-text software and to generate the text inside a collaborative editor displayed in front of the student. The repeater is a valid volunteer listening the professor's speech in the classroom. The software transforms the voice in text. The deaf student could read the text on his own device (a notebook or a mobile device). © 2014 Springer International Publishing.