“Demonstrating Hearing Loss And Deafness In Digital Media” by Parrish
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Title:
- Demonstrating Hearing Loss And Deafness In Digital Media
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Abstract:
Disabilities such as hearing loss are often accounted for in terms of including accessibility in a product, instead I wanted the user’s experience to center around understanding the hearing loss experience though a visual medium. This presentation details a project I created to provide users with a visual representation of moderate and severe hearing loss. Using Max8, I created a digitally interactive piece that offers users 3 choices: to experience a video as though they have regular hearing, moderate hearing loss, or severe hearing loss. After making this choice, a full screen video will play on a monitor and depending on the user’s choice, the video being played with have been put through a different filter (that filter having a higher or lower amount of visual distortion depending on the user’s choice). User’s participation in this piece is meant to illicit a deeper understanding and empathy of what daily experience with hearing loss is like for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Each video’s play and stop features are triggered by different levels of sound – this feature (and the user’s ignorance of this feature) is meant to mimic the daily level of confusion and frustration experienced with hearing loss.
