Music Accessibility for the d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Individuals

Context

In a self-directed research study, I closely worked with a deaf interaction design student named Joyce Lin, advised by Dr. Sarah Coppola from the UW Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) department, to develop an IRB-approved research protocol. The goal was to publish our research in a journal like ASSETS or CHI, and develop a working prototype to support Joyce Lin’s Design Capstone. We have been working on this project since April 2021. This research is funded by the Mary Gates Research Scholarship (Joyce Lin) and the HCDE DEI Mini Grant (Jessie Zhang).

We chose to conduct this research because we self-identify as deaf and hard of hearing, we have different experiences with music, and we were curious about how we could move the d/Deaf and hard of hearing people’s experiences with music forward. Our research consists of two stages: (1) generative research and (2) design prototyping activities. Ultimately, we hope to shift the assumptions about the d/Deaf and hard of hearing people’s experiences with music and suggest a design solution that may later be adopted by companies serving musicians, artists, and fans like Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, etc.

As with every research project, we started with a couple of hypotheses: 

As this was our first time conducting research of this nature, we spent several months developing our IRB research protocol, incorporating feedback from our mentor Dr. Sarah Coppola, who specializes in accessibility and inclusive design as a new disabled faculty member. We developed a milestone plan for each quarter as a means to hold us accountable for our research. We leveraged our relationship with the Disability Resources for Students office at the University of Washington to coordinate accommodations like CART (real-time captioning) and ASL interpreters for ourselves and our research participants.

Research Methods

As our goal of this phase of research was formative, our research methods consisted of: 

1. Literature review

2. Surveys

3. User interviews

We opted to conduct a literature review to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between music experiences and the d/Deaf and hard of hearing experiences, as well as identify any potential gaps in the literature that our research could address.

For surveys, it was important to us researchers for the surveys to be accessible in both English and American Sign Language (ASL) so that d/Deaf and hard of hearing people can answer. Joyce and I split the tasks evenly. For example, I’d create a script in ASL gloss (a way of writing ASL signs) to aid Joyce in signing the questions for our survey while Joyce would build the survey in Google Forms, which is more screenreader accessible and can be read more easily. 

As our research is mainly qualitative, we synthesized our literature review and conducted a thematic analysis of the survey responses and interview responses. We used Miro to note common themes and outliers that emerged.