Evaluation of Software Tools with Deaf Children

Ornella Mich

Eleventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - Posters and Demos (ASSETS 2009)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 26-28, 2009

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Summary

Evaluating software applications with deaf or hard of hearing children requires methods and procedures tuned to them. Indeed, they are unusual users with special communication needs. This paper proposes a list of guidelines for organising effective evaluations of interactive tools with deaf children. The novelty of this work is that such guidelines are not based on theoretical thinking. Instead, they are built on data collected through questionnaires proposed to experts working with deaf children. The questionnaire’s data are reinforced by my experience which was gained during usability tests with deaf children. In future work, the effectiveness of these guidelines will be checked during the evaluation of an e-learning tool for Italian deaf children.

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