Accessibility of Voice-Activated Agents for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

With advances in speech recognition technology, voice-controlled devices such as Alexa have become very popular and ubiquitous. They are inaccessible to Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) users, because of their reliance on spoken-modality input and output, who generally cannot interact with these devices. Some of these devices include visual interfaces which can display captions, which makes the output accessible for literate users, but there has been little work done to make the input accessible for most DHH whose speech is not understandable by the devices. This study seeks to explore alternative accessible input methods for DHH users of voice-controlled devices. The paper examines and reports the accessibility and usability by DHH users of text to speech (TTS), American Sign Language (ASL), and gesture input. The users did not find the gesture system intuitive or usable, and preferred a system that was more similar to ASL. One possibility is to provide users the option of customizable gestures that can be potentially easier to recall and use.