Proposal of Mobile Type Remote-captioning System for Deaf or Hard of Hearing
People and Evaluation by Captionists

Abstract

Deaf or hard-of-hearing people need support services such as real-time captioning. It is fairly common for captionists to be unable to perform captioning services. In order to address this problem, we proposed a Mobile-type Remote-captioning System. The main characteristic of our system is to use two functions of one mobile phone (e.g. the iPhone 3G/3GS, Apple Computer, Inc.) at the same time. The two functions are to display the captions input by the captionists (data communications) and to call the captionists to transmit the speaker's speech to the captionists (telephone call). The purpose of our research was to make clear the differences with the existing system, and to discover the advantages and faults of our system. In this study, we investigated these issues using a questionnaire for captionists who had used our system. As a result, we found that our system is suitable for a situation in which the speaker and the deaf or hard-of-hearing person are communicating while walking together (e.g. excursions, plant tours), whether indoors or outdoors. In addition, it reduces the stress that can be caused to deaf or hard-of-hearing children by having adults (captionists) other than teachers in the classroom.