Beyond Traditional Ethics when Developing Assistive Technology for and with Deaf People in Developing Regions - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 306

also complicated privacy concerns, especially with Facebook, and we can under-
stand the objecting viewpoint to some extent. Yet the anecdote shows (a) how we
can intervene to effect social change and (b) empower the community to make more
informed decisions on their own by increasing ICT capacity, e.g. whether or not,
and even how to use something like Facebook. It is not that we tell people to use
Facebook but rather that we educate them on the advantages, disadvantages and
more importantly the security concerns of any given social media application. In
fact, based on casual observation (being Facebook friends with various DCCT staff
members), Facebook has become an outlet for increased English text literacy and
demonstrates these people's aspirations and goals to fully participate and engage
with a hearing, and often text-based, world.
A related issue is embarrassment from poor text literacy, e.g. mobile texting to
hearing users. We encountered this very early with text relay (Tucker et al. 2003 ) yet
we persisted with automatic text recognition and generation for several years until
video prototypes commenced with Tucker and Ma's work (Ma and Tucker 2007 ,
2008 ). We have noticed how the embarrassment of Deaf users that we have engaged
with has changed as DCCT staff progress with English literacy, e.g. compare some-
one's emails or Facebook posts from even two years ago and today. It is remarkable,
albeit subjectively, how much progress they have made in terms of English fl uency
and confi dence with increased use of text within social media.

4.8 Participant Remuneration

An ongoing dilemma is how to remunerate extremely poor participants for feedback
and data collection exercises. The two local universities have different approaches:
UWC gives food and UCT pays attendees cash. At UWC, we recently opted to provide
money to enable people to attend a data collection section. Many of our participants
can barely afford the bus, train or taxi fare to get to DCCT premises. Money was
given up front, but many attendees simply did not attend. Providing money after the
session is a problem, since participants can legitimately ask 'How can I attend if I
don't have the train fare?'. We have recently changed the UWC remuneration pro-
tocol to use food vouchers at local grocery stores instead of cash unless, of course,
DCCT is already providing lunch, e.g. on a Saturday. Another option could be
mobile airtime/recharge vouchers (but there are four dominant mobile providers).
This change in remuneration has proven successful for several weeks, and the issue
of travel fare has lost signifi cance because (a) the Deaf people surely know that the
pay-up-front was a failure and (b) we can only hope that the allure of participation
in the project is seen as a vehicle towards improved quality of life, i.e. the message
getting around that something interesting is happening at these sessions.
On another level of participation, we employ Deaf research assistants to help
manage the DCCT PC lab and collect data. These people have no formal training,
and none of them have even graduated from high school. These people are often
doing part-time work elsewhere. Instead of setting an hourly, weekly or monthly