An interesting component of what is planned for election night: The ICART team plans to get reactions from deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners who will be invited to these station demos of live, captioned radio.
Dr. Ellyn Sheffield, psychology professor at Towson University and co-director of ICART with Starling, has been working with her team on a series of survey questions for users of the station demos and the Web.
Mary Hinch, a Towson University graduate and one of Sheffield’s research associates working on the captioned radio project, demonstrated for me some of the displays that will be shown to groups — four or five people at a time — on election night, to discern their reactions, likes and dislikes.
Different kinds of interpreters for the deaf and hard-of-hearing will be on hand to help with the surveys; participants will be asked questions about the captioned text, such as which type fonts and colors they prefer, where on the screen is the text most useful and how they would like speakers to be identified in the captioned text.
Participants will be asked how they think emergency alerts should be displayed to differentiate them from regular text.
