The authoring tool described herein is an application that helps a Deaf user and a domain expert, both of whom have little or no programming skills, to design and populate conversation flows for a given limited domain scenario, e.g. visiting a pharmacist or the department of Home Affairs to get an ID book. A limited communication domain allows us to capture and store all relevant content, in this case signed language videos, on a mobile device; avoiding wireless data transfer and attendant costs. The authoring tool produces the user-defined exchange in XML for subsequent interpretation and display on a mobile device; to render an application called SignSupport [1] [2]. The aim of this project is to generalise the conversation flow between communicants and automatically generate a platform-independent script to be consumed and rendered by a platform-dependent mobile app. The authoring tool empowers Deaf people and domain specialists to develop SignSupport scenarios together.

The next step is to design and develop the user interface in conjunction with industrial design engineers, domain experts and Deaf end users, who will be invited to help co-design the tool’s interface in order to better help them create and populate limited communication scenarios prioritised by the Deaf community. We expect that the first scenario produced by the authoring tool will be the current pharmacy scenario, as that version of SignSupport is about to be trialled in an actual hospital pharmacy setting. We will also confer with the Deaf community to identify second and third scenarios, and will primarily be interested in evolving the authoring tool’s palette and canvas interface in order to better support the design and content population processes.

An Authoring Tool to Create Multiple Scenarios of a Mobile App for Deaf PeopleLS Duma and WD Tucker

Computer Science Department, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville 7535, South Africa.

• Authoring toolsThese are applications that can be used by a user with little or no programming skills to build applications, e.g. Microsoft FrontPage.[3]. • Cross platform solutionsCross platform solutions involve developing one application that runs on many platforms. A recent solution under the cross-platform banner is the ‘hybrid’ app, built using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 [4].

• Design for allThis entails developing tools that target end users with different levels of expertise and capabilities. Interface techniques under this topic includes ‘drag-n-drop’, direct manipulation, zoomable user interfaces and WYSIWYG editors [5].

[1] Chininthorn, P., Glaser, M., Freudenthal, A., & Tucker, W. D. (2012). Mobile communication tools for a South African Deaf patient in a pharmacy context. In Proc. IST-Africa. Dar es Salaam: IIMC.

[2] Motlhabi, M. B., Tucker, W. D., Parker, M., & Glaser, M. (2013). Improving Usability and Correctness of a Mobile Tool to help a Deaf person with Pharmaceutical Instruction. In Proc. DEV-4 (Article 13). Cape Town; New York: ACM Press.

[3] Gorman, W., Kniffin, B., & Oster, S. (2001) Web page authoring tool.

[4] Heitkötter, H., Hanschke, S., & Majchrzak, T. A (2013). Comparing Cross-Platform Development Approaches for Mobile Applications. Web Information Systems and Technologies. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 120-138.

[5] Shneiderman, B. Designing the user interface. Pearson Education, 2003.

INTRODUCTION RELATED WORK

REFERENCESFUTURE WORK

USER INTERFACE

How can we generalize SignSupport app creation for multiple limited domain conversation scenarios and also accommodate different signed languages and multiple mobile platforms?

RESEARCH QUESTION