Deaf Community Research Articles

A critical analysis of the challenges faced by deaf farmers in their participation in sustainable food production for nutrition and health in Mashonaland region, Zimbabwe

The Deaf Community in Mashonaland region constitutes a part of the minority population in Zimbabwe and this minority group happens to have capable farmers who are often sidelined from agricultural activities because of their difference from the hearing population. The researcher consulted the San Code of Research Ethics for advice. The study involved Deaf farmers who are involved in animal husbandry, horticulture and crop production, their workers in Mashonaland region. In total eight (8) respondents were interviewed. The researcher recorded and transcribed the collected data. The thematic analysis method was used during data analysis. The researcher grouped the transcribed data into thematic areas based on the research objectives. The findings revealed that lack of important information on important issues such as climate change, lack of access to land ownerships, communication barriers, lack of access to tertiary education and the seclusion of Deaf Community’s representation in policy making are the challenges faced by Deaf farmers in their participation in sustainable food production for nutrition and health in Mashonaland region. The study recommended awareness campaigns on Deaf Culture and the inclusion of Deaf people and other Persons with Disabilities in sustainable food production.
 How to reference using ASWNet style:
 Tome A. R. (2023). A critical analysis of the challenges faced by deaf farmers in their participation in sustainable food production for nutrition and health in Mashonaland region, Zimbabwe. African Journal of Social Work, 13(2), 100-109. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v13i2.6
 Visit journal website: https://ajsw.africasocialwork.net

<O/ No Power but Deaf Power \O>: Revitalizing Deaf Education Systems via Anarchism

Deaf education is an incoherent macrosystem whose sub‐systems—e.g., biomedical vs. sociocultural institutions—contradict. Unreconciled tensions cause stagnation, not regeneration, and harmful dissensus in deaf educational sub‐systems. To revitalize deaf education, address these contradictions, and eliminate incoherence, we posit that a deafled systemic transformation of deaf education is necessary; furthermore, we argue it may best be realized through theories and actions constitutive of anarchism. To this end, we synthesize four thematic loci where anarchism overtly aligns with constructs immanent in deaf communities. First, collectivism is necessary for survival in anarchist and deaf communities toward shared goals including equity in education, social labor, and politics. Second, mutual aid is integral—like anarchists who work arm‐in‐arm, deaf individuals and groups exhibit uncanny solidarity across political, cultural, technological, linguistic, and geographical boundaries. Third, direct action tactics overlap in both groups: When facing internal or external threats, both communities effectively rally local mechanisms to affect change. Finally, both groups exhibit a stubborn, existential refusal to be subdued or ruled by outsiders. Reframing systemic dilemmas in deaf education via anarchism is a novel, beneficial praxis that’s only been tangentially explored. Centering anarchism in deaf education also generates succor for ongoing struggles about sign language in deaf communities. Toward the horizon of radical equality, our staunchly anarchist analysis of deaf education argues that to guide deaf‐positive system change neoliberalism is inert and neo‐fascism anathema.

SIGN LANGUAGE INTERPRETER

Every average person has the ability to see, hear, and respond to their surroundings. Some unfortunate people are without this significant blessing. These people primarily include the deaf and dumb, who interact with others by using sign language. Yet, since not all common people can understand their sign language, communicating with regular people is a significant limitation for them. Also, this will make it difficult for members of the deaf and dumb communities to engage with others, especially when they want to participate in educational, social, and professional settings. The goals of this research are to create a sign language translation system for hearing or speech challenged individuals utilising deep learning and neural networks to help those who are deaf or have trouble speaking or hearing communicate with others. The model utilised in this classification assignment is a pretty simple Convolutional Neural Network implementation for the methodology (CNN). This exploits the convolutional property, which was primarily developed for the analysis of visual imagery. Three layered CNNs were trained and tested in real time using segmented RGB hand motions. With the help of a personal device, such as a laptop webcam, simple photos of the hand were used to construct the image dataset for each gesture. I was able to get training accuracy of roughly 89% and testing accuracy of 98.5% with this CNN model. Keywords : Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Gesture Recognition, Open CV, TensorFlow

Benefits and development of assistive technologies for Deaf people's communication: A systematic review

The development of technologies has made digital accessibility relevant to many everyday processes. Multiple resources have been designed to meet the special needs of a wide variety of people, such as Deaf sign language users, who require inclusive technologies to facilitate their communication in work, educational, and social environments. The objective of this study is to identify assistive technologies that favor and improve communication between Deaf and hearing people. To this end, a systematic review was carried out following the PRISMA checklist and using the Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed databases. A total of 492 documents were identified and subjected to inclusion and exclusion criteria, of which 27 were included in the quantitative synthesis. As a result, technologies based on gesture recognition for the translation of sign language into speech and vice versa, technologies for sign language teaching, technologies for automatic caption generation, technologies based on online content, and technologies based on text and illumination networks were found in the studies. The findings suggest that there is a need for further research into the motivations for developing sign language technologies, as a contribution to the inclusion of Deaf communities in society without linguistic impositions.

Multi-cue temporal modeling for skeleton-based sign language recognition.

Sign languages are visual languages used as the primary communication medium for the Deaf community. The signs comprise manual and non-manual articulators such as hand shapes, upper body movement, and facial expressions. Sign Language Recognition (SLR) aims to learn spatial and temporal representations from the videos of the signs. Most SLR studies focus on manual features often extracted from the shape of the dominant hand or the entire frame. However, facial expressions combined with hand and body gestures may also play a significant role in discriminating the context represented in the sign videos. In this study, we propose an isolated SLR framework based on Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) and Multi-Cue Long Short-Term Memorys (MC-LSTMs) to exploit multi-articulatory (e.g., body, hands, and face) information for recognizing sign glosses. We train an ST-GCN model for learning representations from the upper body and hands. Meanwhile, spatial embeddings of hand shape and facial expression cues are extracted from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) pre-trained on large-scale hand and facial expression datasets. Thus, the proposed framework coupling ST-GCNs with MC-LSTMs for multi-articulatory temporal modeling can provide insights into the contribution of each visual Sign Language (SL) cue to recognition performance. To evaluate the proposed framework, we conducted extensive analyzes on two Turkish SL benchmark datasets with different linguistic properties, BosphorusSign22k and AUTSL. While we obtained comparable recognition performance with the skeleton-based state-of-the-art, we observe that incorporating multiple visual SL cues improves the recognition performance, especially in certain sign classes where multi-cue information is vital. The code is available at: https://github.com/ogulcanozdemir/multicue-slr.

Comparison of small sample methods for Handshape Recognition

Automatic Sign Language Translation (SLT) systems can be a great asset to improve the communication with and within deaf communities. Currently, the main issue preventing effective translation models lays in the low availability of labelled data, which hinders the use of modern deep learning models.
 SLT is a complex problem that involves many subtasks, of which handshape recognition is the most important. We compare a series of models specially tailored for small datasets to improve their performance on handshape recognition tasks. We evaluate Wide-DenseNet and few-shot Prototypical Network models with and without transfer learning, and also using Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML).
 Our findings indicate that Wide-DenseNet without transfer learning and Prototipical Networks with transfer learning provide the best results. Prototypical networks, particularly, are vastly superior when using less than 30 samples, while Wide-DenseNet achieves the best results with more samples. On the other hand, MAML does not improve performance in any scenario. These results can help to design better SLT models.

A Two-Stage Image Frame Extraction Model -ISLKE for Live Gesture Analysis on Indian Sign Language

The new industry revolution focused on Smart and interconnected technologies along with the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data analytics etc. on the real time data to produce the value-added products. The ways the goods are being produced are aligned with the people’s life style which is witnessed in terms of wearable smart devices, digital assistants, self-driving cars etc. Over the last few years, an evident capturing of the true potential of Industry 4.0 in health service domain is also observed. In the same context, Sign Language Recognition- a breakthrough in the live video processing domain, helps the deaf and mute communities grab the attention of many researchers. From the research insights, it is clearly evident that precise extraction and interpretation of the gesture data along with an addressal of the prevailing limitations is a crucial task. This has driven the work to come out with a unique keyframe extraction model focusing on the preciseness of the interpretation. The proposed model ISLKE deals with a clustering-based two stage keyframe extraction process. It has experimented on daily usage vocabulary of Indian Sign Language (ISL) and attained an average accuracy of 96% in comparison to the ground-truth facts. It is also observed that with the two-stage approach, filtering of uninformative frames has reduced complexity and computational efforts. These key leads, help in the further development of commercial communication applications in order to reach the speech and hearing disorder communities.

Perception of Ghanaian healthcare students towards the learning of sign language as course

Communication remains among the top barriers to healthcare for deaf people. One of the reasons is healthcare professionals lack the competence to communicate health information in sign language. Part of the measures to alleviate this challenge was the introduction of sign language into the curriculum of health students. The perceptions of healthcare students on this initiative were assessed in this study. The study used cross-sectional online survey to collect data from 666 randomly sampled health students in Ghana. Participants were recruited through social media platforms. Descriptive statistics, Chi-square was used to analyze the differences between categorical variables at the rate of 95% confidence intervals (p = 0.05), and binary logistic was performed to ascertain predictors of health student’s perception about hospital should provide professional interpreters than students learning GhSL. The study found that about 9 in 10 of all health students support the introduction of GHSL as a course. Student nurses perceive more benefits of learning GHSL to the deaf community than all health students. Logistic regression revealed that students’ midwives were 2.183 times significantly more likely to support the view that hospitals should provide professional interpreters instead of health students learning GHSL as compared with students who study Nursing (AOR: 2.183, CI: 1.104–4.316, p = 0.025). To sustain the interest of students in the learning of GhSL. Appropriate teaching and learning materials should be made available. Likewise, competent instructors should be recruited in the teaching of GhSL. This can be done through a collaborative effort between stakeholders including KNUST, NMC, and the ministry of health.

One Size Continues to Not Fit All

Sensory Futures describes “the complex dependencies associated with cochlear implantation” (p. 29) in India, among a wide range of stakeholders, with a significant focus on the families and the concept of “becoming normal” (p. 2). Sensory Futures begins with a thought-provoking Introduction and includes five chapters (for this reviewer, Chapter 2: Mothers’ Work and Chapter 5: Becoming Normal were most compelling). The book ends with a reflective Conclusion about the author’s Individual Education Plan as a student and insightful “trajectories” of five deaf children (pp. 205–212). Throughout the chapters, Friedner includes descriptions of cochlear implant manufacturers, school programs in India, the work of governmental agencies, and information from assorted clinicians, therapists, and surgeons. The author’s poignant stories, addressing primarily the mothers of deaf children, receive the most attention throughout the text. Although the “twain may never meet,” families must be provided unbiased and informed information about the communication choices and the technology available. Cochlear implants can provide audibility, however, access to sound or detection is far from auditory comprehension. And, Friedner rightly cautions that for persons in deaf culture, there is nothing to be “fixed” or “normalized.” A CI is only a device with the real work in the follow-up. The post-activation journey can follow various paths—for some, learning to listen for the development of spoken language; for others, learning multisensory approaches; and for others, learning sign language. The challenge is that families are not consistently provided information about all their options, and no one can promise a guaranteed outcome for any child.

Social Networking Site Usage of Middle-Aged and Older Deaf Adults.

Social networking sites (SNS) have become increasingly popular in modern society; however, there is insufficient research into the impacts of SNS use on middle-aged and older Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) individuals. D/HH SNS users belonging to the Baby Boomer generation or Generation X (born 1946-1980) were recruited for this study. A mixed-methods approach was utilized, with a survey (n = 32) and interviews (n = 3), to examine primary reasons for use, perceived accessibility of interactions, the relationship between SNS use and life satisfaction, and the impacts of SNS use on this population. SNS platforms were found to be primarily used for social interaction, information seeking, and entertainment purposes. This study further showed that SNS interactions with hearing individuals were significantly more accessible than in-person interactions. The thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed four key themes: exposure and representation, accessibility and social connection, privacy, and ideological polarization. The overall feelings towards these platforms were positive. SNS platforms allowed for increased accessibility through reducing communication barriers. Additionally, as SNS platforms have become increasingly prevalent, participants noted increased representation of the Deaf community within movies and television. This preliminary information sets important groundwork for future research, which can be used to increase the positive impacts for other D/HH individuals.

The institutionalisation of sign language interpreting in Austria and its impact on the construction of the deaf world

Translation and Interpreting Studies research has traditionally drawn on progress models to describe professionalisation processes. In this paper, I will argue that an alternative approach based on two processual concepts, namely Anselm Strauss’s ‘social worlds’ (1978) and Thomas Gieryn’s ‘boundary work’ (1983) might offer new insights. Social worlds are interrelated agglomerations of agents who participate in certain activities and develop shared commitments and ideologies. Boundary work refers to the construction and maintenance of similarities and differences for inclusion in and exclusion from a group. To demonstrate the application of this theoretical-methodological framework, I will map the social worlds involved in the organisation of sign language interpreting in Austria at three crucial stages. I will discuss how the interrelations between the social worlds have influenced institutionalisation and professionalisation and how these in turn have shaped the social world of the sign language interpreters as well as the social world of deaf people.

Illuminating the Paradoxes of Deaf Experience: Bowe, Gannon, and Disability

The last sixty years have been a time of tumultuous change in the American deaf community. Two deaf figures who made a great difference during this period were Frank Bowe and Jack Gannon, who passed away in 2007 and 2022, respectively. Bowe was a prominent disability rights leader, helping to secure more rights for deaf and all disabled Americans, while Gannon helped to advance appreciation of deaf signing communities with his advocacy and several influential studies of deaf people who sign. Although they both lived in the second half of the twentieth century and knew each other, they had quite different lives, mostly because Bowe did not attend a school for deaf students or learn sign language until he was an adult, while Gannon grew up in the deaf community. Their memoirs offer a valuable way for us to investigate the details of recent deaf experience. The books illuminate not only Bowe and Gannon's work to make the world a more just place for deaf people, but also the pressure they both experienced to adopt oralism, the importance of parents and educational placement, the liberating nature of sign language, and the move from deaf schools to educational mainstreaming. The memoirs also give differing perspectives on signing deaf people's complicated relationship with concepts of disability, suggesting a way forward.

Signed Music in the Deaf Community

In the spring of 2019, the first signed musical stage production was performed at Festival Clin d’Oeil—the world’s largest deaf arts festival that brings thousands to Reims, France, biennially. Surrounded by visual and performing arts, an invited delegation from Canada debuted the musical The Black Drum internationally, incorporating physical theater, signed music, projection, and dance. Signed music is an inter-performance art that demonstrates musical elements by culturally deaf individuals who have explored creating musical performances with their hands and bodies. These performances operate according to a distinct artistic style, incorporating elements of signed languages; rhythmic hand, facial, and/or body motions; and media video arts. This article offers insight into the performers’ process and development of a deaf-created signed musical for an international audience, the ways signed music galvanizes community and identity through self-expression, and the impact of The Black Drum on an international audience at Festival Clin d’Oeil. Through ethnomusicological analysis and reflection with perspectives as insider-outsider-mediator, signed music has been researched by the authors and observed throughout the development of The Black Drum in preparation for its Canadian and European premieres. The festival setting is a place where new types of performances are welcomed and evaluated for their acceptance into the community. Responses from audience members and performers revealed that signed music is an emerging genre of its own.

A Multitask Sign Language Recognition System Using Commodity Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi sensing for gesture recognition systems is a fascinating and challenging research topic. We propose a multitask sign language recognition framework called Wi-SignFi, which accounts for gestures in the real world associated with various objects, actions, or scenes. The proposed framework comprises a convolutional neural network (CNN) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) module. It is evaluated on the public SignFi dataset and achieves 98.91%, 86.67%, and 99.99% average gesture recognition accuracies on 276/150 activities, five users, and two environments, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed gesture recognition method outperforms previous methods. Instead of converting the channel state information (CSI) data of multiple antennas into three-dimensional matrices (i.e., color images) as in the existing literature, we found that the CSI data can be converted into matrices (i.e., grayscale images) by concatenating different channels, allowing the Wi-SignFi model to balance between speed and accuracy. This finding facilitates deploying Wi-SignFi on Nvidia’s Jetson Nano edge embedded devices. We expect this work to promote the integration of Wi-Fi sensing and the Internet of Things (IoT) and improve the quality of life of the deaf community.

Educational Breakout Based on Star Wars for Learning the History of Spanish Sign Language

Although educational breakout has been implemented in pre-university stages, there is little evidence in subjects related to history in postsecondary levels. The aim of this paper was to present the results obtained after implementing an educational breakout, under the premises of Universal Design for Learning, in a history subject that belongs to the university degree in Spanish Sign Language and Deaf Community. A descriptive and comparative ex post facto study (N = 59) was developed to quantify the impact of an educational breakout activity on the students’ commitment, establishing a pre- and post-comparison. Significant differences were found with respect to the perception of the speed of the passage of time and with respect to sustained attention, where there was a statistically significant difference between the time before and the time after the educational breakout. The predisposition of university students to participate in gamified or game-based activities was positive and in subjects such as history, and offers good results, both attitudinal and learning.

Twitter Perspectives on Cochlear Implantation: Sentiment and Thematic Analysis.

To identify themes that contribute to the most positive and negative perspectives of cochlear implants (CIs) on Twitter. A cross-sectional qualitative study. Social media (Twitter). In this study, all English-language original tweets mentioning "cochlear implant" from 2019 to 2021 were collected from Twitter's Academic Research Database using a custom Python script. Sentiment analysis was performed using VADER, a sentiment analysis tool built to analyze the inherent positivity or negativity of social media posts. Tweets were quantitatively sorted by compound sentiment score (range -1 [most negative] to 1 [most positive]). Thematic analysis based on grounded theory was performed on the most positive, negative, and "liked" tweets. Of the 19,376 tweets included, the average (standard deviation) compound sentiment score was 0.21 (0.46). A total of 10,375 (53.5%) tweets had a positive tone, 4965 (25.6%) were neutral and 4036 (20.8%) were negative. Of the 100 most negative tweets, the most prominent themes were media representation (21.9%), the controversy of CI within the Deaf community (19.8%), and unrelated to direct patient experience (16.7%). Of the 100 most positive tweets, the most prominent themes were tweets of happiness and support (25.0%), tweets unrelated to direct patient experience (18.0%), and tweets about hearing new sounds (10.0%). While the majority of tweets on CI carried a positive tone, there are ongoing challenges with the stigma surrounding CI. Public perspectives of CI on social media may help clinicians counsel CI patients and elucidate issues that lead to newfound acceptance or ongoing stigma of CI in the general population.

Performing Deaf Identity and Deaf Gain in Michael Arden’s 2015 Spring Awakening

This article examines the 2015 revival of Spring Awakening on Broadway by director Michael Arden, which restaged the musical for both a deaf and hearing audience. The performance of Deaf identity in the musical is read through Tobin Siebers’s concept the “disability masquerade,” whereby the “overvisibility” of ASL reclaims Deaf identity, as well as through elements of Deaf Gain, namely the bilingual structure of the musical and what can be learned from the Deaf experience of music. The integration of ASL into the choreography amplifies the kinesthetic quality of the performance and engages the audience physically, producing what Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds have termed “kinesthetic empathy,” while the bilingual structure accentuates the underlying themes of interpersonal communication. The combination of the affirmative disability masquerade with aspects of Deaf Gain produces a performance that reimagines bilingual access and inclusive aesthetics, and confronts its hearing audience with their own kinesthetic relationship to the world, communication, and music.

Technological socialities: The impact of information and communication technologies on belonging among deaf and hard‐of‐hearing people

AbstractThis review article examines how different types of communication technologies, from the specialized medical to generic social devices, influence belonging and sociality among deaf and hard‐of‐hearing (DHH) people. The emphasis is on DHH adolescents and young adults who may be impacted differently across countries, given state‐specific policies regarding the status of sign language and deaf education, and based on different availability, affordability, and accessibility of communication technologies. We introduce different perspectives on deafness, ranging from pathological to cultural, a heuristic on which we build to explore DHH socialities as complex and evolving. We then analytically review ethnographic research on how cochlear implants impact DHH people's belonging to the “deaf world” and/or the “hearing world,” and how they navigate between these worlds. Then we move on to technologies such as text messages and social media, which enable DHH people to extend their socialities beyond local communities. Belonging is a fluid phenomenon, and technologies which are in a constant process of innovation and development may influence it in complex ways. We argue that to explore questions of belonging, identity, and sociality among DHH people, and how they are shaped by technologies, (visual) ethnographic methods are particularly productive.

The Sign Language Interpreting Gloves

This report’s primary purpose is to provide a detailed overview of the sign language interpreting gloves project. It starts with an introduction, background and history of the deaf community to better understand the needs and issues of the D/deaf community. In the following literature review, the reader will have the chance to learn about the modern-days challenges faced by hearing-impaired people, broadly explained and elaborated. The psychosocial impact of assistive technology and its effectiveness in improving life quality is discussed next. A lack of new technologies assisting the D/deaf community is not hardly noticed. As elaborated in the previously mentioned chapters, sign language interpreting services are expensive and sign language interpreters cannot be easily booked. These and other findings gathered from the research and also by a survey conducted on a group of deaf individuals indicate that sign language interpreting gloves are the new free interpreters-to-be, and the answer to acquiring the so-wanted independence. Evaluated to have such a significant impact, building this assistive technology that can be easily accessed is the project's focus. The working principles, block diagram and flowchart are also described in the methodology section, where building, not one but a pair of gloves is also documented step by step. Finally, results, discussion and future work will tell us more about the importance of interpreting gloves to close the gap between both hearing and deaf communities.

"I Have a Dream and I Wish it Would Come True".

Deaf Bedouin young women in Israel experience marginalization, discrimination, and institutional neglect, which, coupled with the traditions of Bedouin society, pose a complex challenge to social inclusion. This qualitative study of 14 deaf Bedouin young women, using a semi-structured questionnaire, found that instead of providing support, their socio-ethnic affiliation is a source of suffering, whereas their deaf identity and their belonging to the deaf community are sources of strength and self-esteem. The study's contribution is that it presents the unique story of deaf Bedouin young women and reveals how belonging to the deaf community helps them to accept their deafness as uniqueness rather than as a disability and enables them to hold on to their dreams of higher education, obtaining rewarding work, and marrying and raising a family.