Participation of high school and undergraduate students who are deaf in research on American Sign Language animation

The Linguistic and Assistive Technologies Laboratory (the "LATLab") at Queens College of The City University of New York conducts research on computational linguistics and human computer interaction - with a focus on assistive technology and accessibility applications for people with disabilities. We are currently conducting a five-year study supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (NSF Award #0746556). The goals of this research are to significantly improve the state of the art of animations of American Sign Language (ASL), which have important accessibility applications for people who are deaf. (Details of the scientific aims of this project are included below.)

This article describes the educational outreach component of this project --- the participation of deaf high school students and undergraduate students in summer research experiences. Our goal in writing this article is to describe how the educational component of our project integrates with the scientific goals and to explain some of the details behind the summer research experiences we have organized. We hope that other SIGACCESS members who are interested in incorporating educational outreach efforts into their research may find this information useful when designing and proposing their own projects.

There are several deaf students and researchers involved in our project. Each summer, two or three students from local deaf high schools or mainstream programs in the greater New York City area participate in three-month research experiences at the LATLab. In addition, we have also hosted a deaf undergraduate student (visiting from Gallaudet University) for a summer research experience, and a graduate-level deaf research assistant coordinates projects at the lab on an ongoing basis part-time throughout the academic year.

We believe that the involvement of deaf ASL-signers in the research will help to train future researchers who have a community and cultural connection to the outcome of the work. Further, only users of ASL who have native level fluency are able to accomplish some of the aspects of the research: analyzing recordings of sign language we collect and conducting experimental sessions in which native ASL signers from the local community come to the lab to evaluate the ASL animations we produce.

Our objective is to attract deaf students to careers in computer science by enabling deaf high school and undergraduate students to experience the research process. Students with disabilities pursue science careers at a lower than average rate (CEOSE, 2004), and our goal is to encourage the interest of these students in pursuing higher education and careers in the sciences, at a time when they may be making decisions about their future education. While these students have minimal programming or linguistics background, their ASL fluency can allow them to make meaningful contributions to the project. We want them to become aware of applications of computer science with direct relevance to the deaf community --- generating animations of American Sign Language to make information sources more accessible to deaf individuals who may have low literacy in written English.