Beyond Traditional Ethics when Developing Assistive Technology for and with Deaf People in Developing Regions - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 289

Sign Language (SASL). Our understanding of Deaf vs. deaf is that deaf and hard-
of-hearing people prefer to use the written and spoken language of the surrounding
majority even when they struggle to hear, e.g. using amplifi cation, reading lips and
via text. Deaf people, on the other hand, are those who prefer to use SASL as a
'mother tongue' including hearing children of Deaf adults (CODA). Thus people
can be both Deaf and/or deaf; and the cultural considerations become very interest-
ing in developing regions.
Given this context, allow us to relay a short anecdote that serves to highlight the
kind of issues we encounter that push us beyond traditional ethics concerns:
We learned that Deaf people in the community were somewhat embarrassed by their use of
text to communicate with hearing people. We also observed that they had no such inhibition
texting to one another in broken and misspelled English. Since instant messaging and other
forms of Internet-based texting were thousands of times cheaper than SMS (short message
service), we began an informal awareness campaign to champion the use of MXit and
Facebook. While the majority of the DPO staff was keen to embrace these cheap services to
communicate with one another, one leader was adamant that neither was appropriate for
Deaf people. The explanation was as follows: There was a high profi le tabloid story about
MXit and pornography; that MXit could be commandeered to send pornography to people.
Regarding Facebook, the concern was that someone could use a PC at the DPO to say
something negative about someone on Facebook and the DPO could be sued for libel
because of the physical placement of the computer. Our initial reaction was that these
concerns were not entirely valid since with either service, one can choose one's friends, and
therefore control incoming and outgoing messages. We went ahead and encouraged the
others to learn how use MXit and Facebook, and tried to inform this leader that the
concerns could be addressed by knowledge of how to better use the tool. We continue to try
and understand where the concerns are coming from. However, many Deaf people in the
community have made the plunge, especially on Facebook, where all comments are some-
what public, i.e. some felt empowered and used the services, whilst others did not and
declined to do so. We must accept both ways as valid.
The anecdote brings to light several interventionist ethical issues that arise
during the course of conducting action research which are not necessarily covered
by traditional codes of ethics or institutional review board (IRB) type evaluation:
the Deaf leader's aversion to MXit and Facebook and how we nonetheless encour-
aged others to learn how to use those applications and even told that reluctant
person we were doing so. This is a situation that can arise in action research and
interventionist information and communication technology for development
(ICT4D) work that an IRB, at least for computer science or engineering, does not
and cannot address. This chapter argues that these types of issues also have ramifi -
cations for technical systems design.
A strong argument for ICT4D was made by Brewer et al. ( 2005 ), in particular the
leveraging of Computer Science for the task (Dias and Brewer 2009 ). The chal-
lenges of ICT4D research are technical, environmental and cultural (Brewer et al.
2006 ). The non-technical aspects often tend to dominate in resource-limited envi-
ronments (RLEs), particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs),
requiring the formation of multidisciplinary teams and the deployment of mixed
methods. For this reason, some may question if it is even Computer Science research
(Toyama and Ali 2009 ). Despite these disciplinary squabbles, the 'fi eld' of ICT4D