1. ICCHP Activities
The presentations within the framework of the 15th IFIP World Computer Congress were a full success. The general goal of the project, namely to develop awareness of voice to text recognition capabilities and their usability for hearing impaired persons, could be reached to a larger extent than this could have been foreseen. A very encouraging figure of this awareness is the high number of participants to the workshop (65).
But also within the International Conference on Computers Helping People within Special Needs, which was the section of the ifip'98 world computer congress in which the VOICE activities were held, the VOICE activities took a large share: In total some 50 full scientific papers where presented, but only 4 of them dealing with hearing impairments, two of them in context of the VOICE project. This means that the VOICE project represented 50% of the contributions dealing with hearing impairments.
Within this conference three posters dealing with hearing impairments have been exhibited, one of them the VOICE poster, which means that also in the context of poster presentations the share of the VOICE project was a third.
The most interactive activities, namely the workshop and the user group
meeting, showed a very high interest of the participants in the field
of voice recognition and its usability for hearing impaired persons.
Overall, the experiences gathered in the activities of the ICCHP'98
were very encouraging and have built a good basis for further activities.
2. Definition of the User Needs
One of the most important goals of the VOICE project in general and the events in detail is the collection of user needs. The functionality and the composition of the equipment of the VOICE prototype is the direct consequence of the user tests done by our Italian partners during the development process of the prototype demonstrator.
The demonstrator therefore is the basis for the ongoing collection of user requirements. All the demonstrations and tests are done by use of the demonstrator prototype, and the reactions of the users are collected and influence the further development of the software and, as a consequence, the functionality, as well as the composition of the equipment.
As the tests are going on, there are open issues in many questions concerning functionality and usability. It has to be pointed out, that for the Austrian partners the ICCHP events are only the starting point for the analysis of the users needs. In addition to these events and the presentation at the conference in Husum, intensive tests will be carried out soon, mainly in collaboration with special education institutions and broadcasting corporations. The contacts of Institut für Hör- und Sehbildung to other institutions involved in special education or in the training of special education teachers and similar staff of institutions dealing with several kinds of impairments are important in order to get a high number of various test situations. Also, during the workshop the participants were asked to provide situations in which the demonstrator prototype could be tested.
Our experiences show a high interest of the participants of any of the events. People want to be kept informed about further activities of the project. Most of them ask for internet resources they could use to stay in contact. Therefore, the establishment of the various VOICE internet sites is most important:
As all the tests are going on the one hand and the specification of the prototype has been done by our Italian partners on the other hand, it is now too early for the Austrian partners to report about the definition of new user needs. Intensive tests will be going on in the near future and for sure lead to the specification of additional user needs.