Beyond Traditional Ethics when Developing Assistive Technology for and with Deaf People in Developing Regions - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 290

accommodate a continuum of contributions from both technical and social sciences.
Several dominant themes have emerged. One of them is HCI (human computer
interaction) for development research. Examples include Ramachandran et al.
( 2007 ), Kam et al. ( 2006 ) and Anokwa et al. ( 2009 ) who all in one way or another
advocate that traditional participatory design (PD) is not suffi cient where one must
consider and incorporate a social context that is often alien and unfamiliar to
researchers performing fi eldwork in developing regions.
Information and communication technology (ICT) and AT for disability and
accessibility in RLEs is a relatively small niche research area (Samant et al. 2013 ).
Research papers on disability in RLEs and LMICs are extremely rare. Consider full
papers in two fl agship conferences on ICT for development: ICTD (International
Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development)
and DEV (Annual Symposium on Computing for Development). There were six
ICTD conferences from 2006 until 2013. Out of 115 full papers in total, only 2
concerned disability, and both were on AT for blind people (Lauwers et al. 2007 ; Pal
et al. 2013 ). There were four DEV conferences from 2010 until 2013. Of the 68 full
papers, only 2 concerned AT for disability, and both were co-authored by this chap-
ter's author (Tucker and Blake 2010 ; Motlhabi et al. 2013b ). Outside of these con-
ferences, ICT research with and/or for Deaf people in developing regions appears to
be quite scarce. Notable examples include a comparison that identifi ed a huge gap
in ICT usage between deaf people in developed and developing regions (Agboola
and Lee 2000 ), DeVelle's ( 2011 ) short paper on mobile devices for Deaf people, and
Mbulamwana's ( 2011 ) short and contradictory discussion about the merits of SMS
while noting that 80% of Deaf Ugandans are illiterate and their English skills are
therefore very low. Then there are numerous outputs by members of our research
team, including but not limited to Glaser ( 2000 ), Glaser and Aarons ( 2002 ), Glaser
et al. ( 2005 ), Zulu et al. ( 2005 ), Glaser and Lorenzo ( 2006 ), Mutemwa and Tucker
( 2010 ), Blake et al. ( 2011 ), Chininthorn et al. ( 2012 ), Henney and Tucker ( 2013 ),
and Motlhabi et al. ( 2013a , b ). We feel we have much experience in this niche area,
especially concerning Southern Africa, with developing regions that are not unlike
many others across the globe, although they retain notably African characteristics,
such as 'ubuntu' (see Sect. 2.5 below).
Many researchers in the ICT4D realm work within an action research paradigm,
with explicit goals of socio-economic development and empowerment via interven-
tionist and transformative participation. Action research is essentially a post-
positivist approach that is criticised by positivist scientists for being non-replicable,
unobjective and non-scientifi c. However, the scientifi c basis of action research has
been argued by Susman and Evered ( 1978 ) and Checkland and Holwell ( 1998 ), and
many practitioners in the fi elds of Information Systems and ICT4D adhere to action
research tenets. At its heart, action research concerns leveraging research for
empowerment, emanating from a Scandinavian tradition of worker empowerment
(Stringer 1997 ; Carr and Kemmis 1991 ). A major challenge of action research is to
achieve both community empowerment and academic research outputs. McKay and
Marshall ( 2001 ) called this the 'dual imperative', which manifests a tension between
praxis and theory.