Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Text-Based Access
Technologies
1
Overview
educational background, use of hearing
aids or implant devices, and availability
and accessibility of services. At extremes,
some individuals have good ability to
understand speech while listening and
reading lips (also called speechread-
ing), whereas others have great difficulty
with both. It cannot be assumed that
all deaf and hard of hearing individuals
(including hearing individuals) are able
to understand everything they hear even
with optimized technology, nor can it be
assumed that all have the ability to read
lips or even be trained to read lips. For
example, there are some Deaf individu-
als who do not use hearing-based tech-
nology (e.g., hearing aids or implantable
This chapter draws attention to some
powerful text-based access technologies
that help facilitate communication in
digital print form through the translation
of speech-to-text and from text-to-text.
These technologies are in contrast to text-
to-speech (i.e., speech synthesis) which
may help individuals unable to speak, and
speech-to-speech which may offer some
form of translation from one language to
another. Deaf and hard of hearing people
make up a diverse group with wide varia-
tion in type and severity of hearing loss,
age at onset, communication modalities,
1
Portions of this chapter are reprinted or modified from a previously published article by Atcherson, S.
R., & Smith, R. E. (2010). I see what you're saying.
Hearing Health
,
26
, 30-34.
Permission of Hearing
Health Foundation.
175
