A Usability Guide to Intelligent Web Tools for the Literacy of Deaf People

The need of literacy tools for deaf people is well documented in the literature of deaf studies. This chapter aims at drawing the attention of the HCI and AI worlds on the need of intelligent web tools for the literacy of deaf people. It reviews several such e-tools. The review tries to cover complementary and diverse literacy aspects, ranging from word knowledge to global reasoning on texts. The authors assess whether the tools conform to the User Centred Design Methodology, and put forward a first set of usability guidelines based on such a methodology for the design of more intelligent web e-tools for the literacy of deaf people. The chapter concludes by eliciting a debate on the need of a deaf user centred design.