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People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) benefit from text captioning to understand audio, yet captions alone are often insufficient for the complex environment of a panel presentation, with rapid and unpredictable turn-taking among multiple speakers. It is challenging and tiring for DHH individuals to view captioned panel presentations, leading to feelings of misunderstanding and exclusion. In this work, we investigate the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) head-mounted displays for providing captioning with visual cues to indicate which person on the panel is speaking. For consistency in our experimental study, we simulate a panel presentation in virtual reality (VR) with various types of MR visual cues; in a study with 18 DHH participants, visual cues made it easier to identify speakers.
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This content will become publicly available on April 25, 2026
Tactile Emotions: Multimodal Affective Captioning with Haptics Improves Narrative Engagement for d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Viewers
This paper explores a multimodal approach for translating emotional cues present in speech, designed with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (dhh) individuals in mind. Prior work has focused on visual cues applied to captions, successfully conveying whether a speaker’s words have a negative or positive tone (valence), but with mixed results regarding the intensity (arousal) of these emotions. We propose a novel method using haptic feedback to communicate a speaker’s arousal levels through vibrations on a wrist-worn device. In a formative study with 16 dhh participants, we tested six haptic patterns and found that participants preferred single per-word vibrations at 75 Hz to encode arousal. In a follow-up study with 27 dhh participants, this pattern was paired with visual cues, and narrative engagement with audio-visual content was measured. Results indicate that combining haptics with visuals significantly increased engagement compared to a conventional captioning baseline and a visuals-only affective captioning style.
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- PAR ID:
- 10649214
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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