Social App Accessibility for Deaf Signers

TL;DR

This study explores how Deaf signers engage with social media, highlighting barriers they face and suggesting ways to improve accessibility for sign language users on these platforms.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into social media use by Deaf signers and identifies specific barriers and potential improvements for accessibility.

Findings

Deaf signers prefer sharing in written English despite their desire to use sign language.

Lack of captions hinders content consumption for Deaf signers.

Producing content with sign language faces challenges like captioning and signing into devices.

Abstract

Social media platforms support the sharing of written text, video, and audio. All of these formats may be inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), particularly those who primarily communicate via sign language, people who we call Deaf signers. We study how Deaf signers engage with social platforms, focusing on how they share content and the barriers they face. We employ a mixed-methods approach involving seven in-depth interviews and a survey of a larger population (n = 60). We find that Deaf signers share the most in written English, despite their desire to share in sign language. We further identify key areas of difficulty in consuming content (e.g., lack of captions for spoken content in videos) and producing content (e.g., captioning signed videos, signing into a phone camera) on social media platforms. Our results both provide novel insights into social media use by Deaf signers and reinforce prior findings on DHH communication more generally, while revealing potential ways to make social media platforms more accessible to Deaf signers.