Accessibility perspectives on enabling South African sign language in the South African National Accessibility Portal

Abstract

Persons with disabilities are often marginalised from economy and society due to the lack of access to disability related information and services. Through the use of c access to the information and services can often be obtained e.g. a visually impaired user using a screen reader. The Deaf however, cannot use such technology to break the barrier because of differences in literacy and comfort with written material. The Deaf thus requires another intervention to improve their access to information and services. One such mechanism is by embedding animated Sign Language in Web pages. This paper analyses the effectiveness and appropriateness of using this approach by embedding South African Sign Language in the South African National Accessibility Portal. Through experiments, user evaluations and web-metrics it is found that such techniques can improve the accessibility for Deaf users in experimental conditions. However, real world pervasiveness will be limited because of practical concerns such as the difficulty to create and maintain animated Sign Language and bandwidth constraints that impact on users’ browsing experience..