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Our Projects
The DKO team is striving to help their project partner, Deaf Kids Code, to make STEM education accessible to Deaf and Hard of Hearing students. We have formed a partnership with Khan Academy to translate a thousand of their educational videos into American Sign Language (ASL). Once the goal of a thousand videos is met, Khan Academy has agreed to make ASL an official language option on their website.
At the beginning of Spring 2017, our team began manually translating Khan Academy tutorials into ASL by hiring professional translators. Throughout this process, our team realized that it was inefficient and expensive to be a sustainable system. Thus, DKO came up with the idea to develop an open-source platform for Deaf educators to contribute to the translation project. Currently, our goals are to have the front-end fully developed soon and to begin the back-end development, such that the product is ready to be released and utilized by Spring 2021.
Deaf Kids Outreach
(DKO)
Keep The Tempo (KTT)
-- On Hold This Semester
Our team project will result in a prototype for a new Tempo Trainer designed with Deaf swimmers in mind. This product is being created for Deaf swimmers, specifically a high school swimmer named Katie. A successful product could also be shared among other competitive Deaf swimmers around the world to help them train and improve. We are working on this project because of the lack of adaptive training technology for Deaf swimmers. Swimmers with normal hearing use tempo trainers (small devices that beep to help the swimmer keep a stroke pace), but there is a lack of similar technology for Deaf swimmers.
The motivation for LCE (Live Captioning Environment) is to help Deaf and Hard of Hearing students to achieve a fair chance for education. The goal is to improve the average learning environment for Deaf and Hard of Hearing students without causing disruption to the rest of the class. This project started in the fall of 2021, and it's currently in the testing phase and will soon be delivered. The main goal of LCE is to find programs and services that can be made accessible to everyone with little to no barriers to entry, and promote those to school systems. In spring of 2022, research for the Blind and Low Vision community was also added to this project. LCE has now taking the research and turned it into guidelines that can be compiled and sent to schools to inform them of the endless opportunities to improve accessibility.
Live Captioning Environment (LCE)
Deaf Can! Coffee
(DCC) -- On Hold This Semester
Our project partner is Blake Widmier, who is the founder of Deaf Can! Coffee. He is based at a school for the Deaf in Kingston, Jamaica. He and some of the students started off making coffee as a hobby and it has slowly grown into a business; they now have a coffee shop on the school campus where they train the students in the art of being a barista. The goal is to train the students to be the best baristas in Jamaica, thus providing a way for the students to provide for themselves in an otherwise tough environment. The DCC team's goal is to create a huller that removes parchement from coffee beans and is designed with a Deaf user in mind; with this huller, the students will not have to remove the parchment by hand, saving hours of time, and can instead focus on learning the other aspects of the coffee making process. Our huller is specifically for Blake and Deaf Can! Coffee, but if we are able to make a cheap and effective product, we could also try to see if small scale farmers would be interested in it.
Our goal is to create a user-friendly, mobile product that will allow Deaf and hearing people to communicate seamlessly using the languages with which they are most comfortable. We believe that when Deaf and hearing people can communicate more easily and comfortably, the increased potential for collaboration will lead to a higher workforce participation rate among Deaf people. Our project will facilitate communication between Deaf and hearing individuals in workplaces, schools, and other collaborative environments. Our system for mobile, two way interpretation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English has three main components: a pair of motion capture gloves, a mobile app, and machine translation tools that run on a remote backend. Currently, we have designed and built a prototype for the motion capture gloves, written the user interface workflow for the mobile app, and developed strategies for parsing the motion capture data using machine learning.
Deaf Airport Accessibility(DAA) -- Completed Spring 2019
JAM --Completed Fall 2017
Our team also worked with Deaf Can Coffee. Communication can be difficult between employees and customers who are unfamiliar with Jamaican Sign Language (JSL). In order to address this issue, our team developed an an intuitive ordering application that has a recommendation system to guide new customers through the ordering process, as well as a quick full-menu order page for returning customers to place their order with ease. In addition to these features, our application displayed the JSL hand signs to communicate your order or any questions you have to the cashier. By providing customers the opportunity to engage in sign-language firsthand, our project raised awareness for the Deaf community.
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