Mixed Local and Remote Participation in Teleconferences from a Deaf and Hard of Hearing Perspective
Christian Vogler, Paula Tucker, Norman Williams · 2013 · Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/2513383.2517035
Summary
This experience report describes the accessibility challenges faced by deaf and hard of hearing members of the FCC's Emergency Access Advisory Committee (EAAC) during 2.5 years of collaboration with 25-30 hearing committee members in mixed local and remote meeting settings. The group included ASL users, Signed English users, and spoken English users who are hard of hearing — each with different communication needs. The authors document the evolution from audio-only conference bridges (with relay services) through progressively improved setups to a FuzeMeeting-based videoconferencing solution. Initial focus groups at Gallaudet University with deaf and hard of hearing users identified nine recurring problems: translation lag causing deaf participants to always be behind the conversation, difficulty getting the floor before topics change, frequent handoffs between relay interpreters causing loss of continuity, gender mismatches between signers and their relay interpreter voices, unfamiliarity of VRS interpreters with technical terminology, captioning errors, organizer reluctance to provide accommodations, lack of CART support in teleconferencing tools, and video quality insufficient for sign language. A particularly damaging problem was "double translation" — when multiple deaf participants called via separate VRS connections, their signs were translated ASL-to-English-back-to-ASL, resulting in significant information loss.
Key findings
The paper documents 17 detailed lessons learned through trial and error. Key findings include: non-signing hearing staff are poor judges of sign language video quality — what seemed acceptable to them was actually unusable for signers; a minimum of three sign language interpreters is needed for multi-hour meetings (two is too taxing); firewalls with deep packet inspection can degrade video quality by introducing jitter; WiFi is too unreliable for sign language video — wired Ethernet is essential; a two-monitor setup is strongly recommended (one for signers, one for presentations); webcam quality and lighting matter significantly for frame rates; procedures and policies (mandatory name identification, hand-raising queues, designated moderator) are as important as technology; and the needs of people with multiple disabilities must be considered (e.g., deaf-blind participants may need tactile signers with dedicated cameras). The accessibility barriers were so severe that many deaf and hard of hearing members initially dropped out of conference calls altogether, and it took years of iteration to achieve a workable solution.
Relevance
This report is invaluable for any organization running hybrid meetings with deaf and hard of hearing participants — an increasingly common scenario in remote and hybrid work environments. Unlike laboratory studies, it documents real-world challenges encountered over years of actual committee work, making the lessons highly practical. The 17 lessons learned serve as a comprehensive checklist for accessible teleconferencing deployment. For accessibility practitioners, several insights are particularly important: relay services that work well for one-on-one calls break down in multi-party conferences; video quality requirements for sign language are significantly higher than for typical talking-head video calls; and social/procedural accommodations (speaker identification, turn-taking protocols, hand-raising tools) are as critical as technical solutions. The experience also highlights the challenge of serving a diverse deaf and hard of hearing population with different communication modes within a single meeting setup.
Tags: deaf accessibility · hard of hearing · teleconferencing · videoconferencing · sign language · CART · video relay service · remote participation · telecommunications accessibility