A speech-to-text system's acceptance evaluation: Would deaf individuals adopt this technology in their lives?

Abstract

The problem observed was the difficulty of people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (D/HH) to know what is being said or informed in an environment, especially at schools, when sign language interpreter is absent. Thus, the main goal was to investigate which variables most influence on the acceptance of a Speech-To-Text system with regard to the different profiles of people who are D/HH. For the purpose mentioned, we conducted a pilot study in two distinct field researches, in which 11 D/HH volunteers participated. During this study, we used two models as inspiration, TAM and UTAUT, for data collection, which was concerned with: written communication, educational barriers, technology use, habit of using captions and subtitles, emotions, technology acceptance, social influence, empowerment and privacy. In the case of emotions, we used Emotion-LIBRAS, an instrument for people who are D/HH to identify positive, negative or mixed emotions towards technology. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.