Web accessibility for the hearing impaired

With the exponential increase of Internet usage and the embedding of multimedia content on the Web, some of the Internet resources remain inaccessible for people with disabilities. Particularly, people who are deaf or Hard of Hearing (HOH) experience inaccessible Web sites due to a lack of Closed Captioning (CC) for multimedia content on the Web, no sign language equivalents for the content on the Web, and an insufficient evaluation framework for determining if a Web page is accessible to the Hearing Impaired community. Several opportunities for accessing content needed to be rectified in order for the Hearing Impaired community to access the full benefits of the information repository on the Internet. The research contributions of this thesis are to resolve some of the Web accessibility problems being faced by the Hearing Impaired community. These objectives are to create an automated CC for the Web for multimedia content, to embed sign language equivalent for content available on the Web, to create a framework to evaluate Web accessibility for the Hearing Impaired community, and to create a social network for the Deaf community. To demonstrate the feasibility of fulfilling the above listed objectives several prototypes were implemented. These prototypes have been used in real life scenarios in order to have an objective evaluation of the proposed framework. Further, the implemented prototypes have had an impact to both the academic community and to the industry.