The STAUT-Reader, making general-purpose texts accessible to deaf.

Abstract

Deaf individuals have difficulty in reading texts written in languages whose mode is oral-auditory, such as Portuguese. As users of a signed language, it is harder for them to gain knowledge from general-purpose information, contained in books, magazines and newspapers. Technology can be used to help readers with disabilities. For this purpose, we have built the STAUT-Reader, an electronic reader, designed to help deaf to have access to texts originally written in Portuguese. The tool uses a Rule-Based Machine Translation system to produce output texts in gloss notation, a written representation of Libras, the Brazilian Sign Language. To investigate our proposal we conduct an experiment using a counterbalanced within-subjects design to evaluate the effects of our tool on the reading performance of deaf readers. The results showed to be promising, especially for non-oralized deaf.