Beyond Traditional Ethics when Developing Assistive Technology for and with Deaf People in Developing Regions - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 305

for us, this community meets on a monthly basis, on the third Sunday of each month,
and we can tap into this for (a) data collection and (b) publicity of the ICT that is
available to the community. After tapping into the third Sundays several times, how-
ever, we have had to withdraw because DCCT staff recently informed us that Deaf
people prefer not to have data collection activities during that time because their
main purpose to attend third Sunday is social. The DPO staff recommended we
rather perform data collection on a Saturday and also pay for transport to and from
the centre (see Sect. 4.8 ).

4.6 Creating Expectations

Because of the useful and innovative nature of our work, we are often approached
to disseminate our work more widely than customary academic venues. We now
feel we can only bring attention to the wider community of a particular intervention
when it can actually be used by them. We made the mistake of creating false expec-
tations in the early days of the text relay phase. We had developed a prototype in the
lab that worked one way between a Teldem text telephone and a telephone, i.e. it
converted text to speech with Festival, an open source text to speech engine. We had
published a paper (Penton et al. 2002 ) and received attention from the media. There
was a magazine article, an online report and several radio interviews. However, the
fallout was that the public exposure generated false expectations for marginalised
Deaf people who wanted to use our work right there, right now. A university will
often exercise pressure to highlight community-engaged research projects publicly
and possibly prematurely. We recently declined to do this with the SignSupport
project based on previous experience with the automated relay and turned down
offers for newspaper and magazine articles, and radio and television interviews.
However, we did allow 'public' notice on the university website where our project
can be portrayed as research and not a commercially available product. The current
thinking is that we can go public after SignSupport for the pharmacy context has
been trialled at an actual hospital pharmacy with real users and drugs. In reality, we
should only do so when we have a mechanism online to allow Deaf people to down-
load, install and use the application.

4.7 Challenging the Status Quo

As the anecdote at the start of this chapter highlighted, a consequence of action
research can entail challenging the status quo, especially if people, e.g. elders, self-
appoint themselves as gatekeepers (or indeed as roadblocks). We kept encouraging
staff members to use Facebook and MXit despite disapproval from some of the
DPO staff. Facebook can make communication in text for Deaf people problematic,
considering the attendant problems of literacy and even online etiquette. There are