Analyzing Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Users' Behavior, Usage, and Interaction with a Personal Assistant Device that Understands Sign-Language Input

As voice-based personal assistant technologies proliferate, e.g., smart speakers in homes, and more generally as voice-control of technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, new accessibility barriers are emerging for many Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) users. Progress in sign-language recognition may enable devices to respond to sign-language commands and potentially mitigate these barriers, but research is needed to understand how DHH users would interact with these devices and what commands they would issue. In this work, we directly engage with the DHH community, using a Wizard-of-Oz prototype that appears to understand American Sign Language (ASL) commands. Our analysis of video recordings of DHH participants revealed how they woke-up the device to initiate commands, structured commands in ASL, and responded to device errors, providing guidance to future designers and researchers. We share our dataset of over 1400 commands, which may be of interest to sign-language-recognition researchers.