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Abstract:

Children and young people who are deaf or have hearing impairments do not master the spoken and written language well. Moreover, their friends and relatives do not always speak sign language. In this research, a communication aid is developed on the Google Android mobile operating system to reduce these barriers by converting text into relevant images and movies thereby clarifying the meaning of the text. Users can select text from webpages, e-mail and SMS messages, or text can be generated using speech recognition or optical character recognition as input source. The communication tool analyzes the sentences and tries to understand the context and meaning of the text in order to select the most appropriate visual content originating from online sources like YouTube, Flickr, Google Images, and Vimeo. User tests and focus groups with deaf children and interviews with experts in the field of deaf and hard hearing people confirmed the need for a communication aid and proved the utility of the proposed tool.