Most deaf children born to hearing parents are deprived of language development stimuli for the first year or more since the diagnosis of hearing impairment is delayed and even if diagnosed, the stigma attached to deafness leads to parents attempting to either find a medical solution where resources permit or in denial or attempts to train the child in lip reading and, in many cases, due to audism, active discouragement of the use of sign language. Children with at least one deaf parent acquire sign language skills very early and have much better linguistic skills. Again, the data on the ratio of the number of DHH individuals in India who are children of hearing parents to the number of children with deaf parents is unknown.
What is clear on the ground is that DHH children are way behind their peers in terms of language skills and this deficit continues to widen and appear in all areas of academic accomplishments. On this note we outlined a solution based on the ludic design for accessibility framework to address the above two problems.
We have introduced a new methodology called ludic design for accessibility (LDA) that keeps play and playfulness central to the design of any solution for accessibility. This methodology has been applied over the past few years to solutions involving children and adults with vision impairments. In this work we explore the use of the Ludic Design methodology to address the above two challenges.
The specific details of the 7-step LDA methodology are given below.
1) Involve: We have been working with students and teachers of the National Institute of Speech and Hearing right from the start. We currently have 3 deaf interns from NISH as the core part of the team in developing the solutions.
2) Examine: With multiple semi-structured conversations and email exchanges, we explored the games and play in the life of the three interns as well as through them that of the students in their class at NISH. This has informed our initial exploration of games and play
3) Ideate: Based on the inputs about the games and the hearing authors experience of games similar to these we explored several games that will be described in the next section
4) Liberate: As will be seen in the details of the games, we allowed all the players to suggest and modify the game rules with a focus on enjoyment of the games.
5) Enable: all of the games were structured so that they were inclusive of both the deaf and hearing. Further, we played the games in an online mode, allowing for hybrid and in-person play as well.
6) Evaluate: This aspect of the games will have to await finalisation of the game and play by a number of players. We need to define the metrics for evaluating the intended objectives: increased competence in English for the deaf, increased competence in ISL for the hearing, and data collection of labelled ISL sentences.
7) Iterate: Multiple iterations of the games as well as the evaluation metrics and the evaluation methodology are in the immediate future.