Creating A Fire Safety Website
for Teenagers Who Are Deaf
by Lacy Landrum, Doctoral Student at Oklahoma State University
I am honored to receive the Lone Star Community’s (LSC) Traditional Education Scholarship. This scholarship will enable me to complete my dissertation research, which involves building and testing a fire safety Web site specifically for teenagers who are deaf.
The Research Idea Is Born
During the last two years, I have been the lone technical writer for a series of projects in Oklahoma focused on fire safety for people with disabilities. The first project consisted of four guides customized for people with mobility, hearing, and/or vision impairments. The project’s consumers received a specialized smoke alarm and one of the guides, which included information about testing and maintaining the alarm, creating a home escape plan, and preventing fire hazards. In addition, we created a fire safety DVD in American Sign Language (ASL).
As I edited and guided the messages through production, we undertook a second project focused on young children—a 15-day fire safety curriculum. We met with educators from the Oklahoma School for the Blind and the Oklahoma School for the Deaf to discuss accommodations and how to ensure their students could benefit from the curriculum. During one of these meetings, a teacher said the best way to reach middle school and high school students who are deaf is through a Web site. The wheels in my head began churning as I realized my experience in Web design might enable a worthwhile project for all of us.
STC Experiences Pave Way for Current Research
My experiences in STC have paved the way for my success year after year. For example, maintaining our STC student chapter’s Web site at Oklahoma State was how I learned Dreamweaver. My first conference presentation, focused on Web design, was at the 2003 STC Annual Conference hosted by LSC. Now, STC is providing me another chance to succeed through this scholarship.
My Dissertation: Intersecting Accessibility and Usability
My dissertation research challenges my Web design skills by intersecting accessibility and usability issues for people who are deaf. Much of the current research in Web accessibility focuses on people using assistive technology. We have assumed that people who are deaf should have few problems accessing Web sites because they can see just fine, though their differences in linguistic and cognitive processing are well documented.
I am testing this assumption, so we can add or revise any necessary guidelines as we finalize Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/). I am testing whether people who are deaf can benefit from ASL video and more concrete navigation systems. Through think-aloud interviews with students at the School for the Deaf, I am also testing whether we can use instant messaging software, in lieu of interpreters, to facilitate usability testing. This technique could provide a cost-effective way to include in testing an often overlooked population who depend on Web sites far more than people with average hearing ranges.
Conclusion
The results will benefit all of us, especially as we deliver complex safety information to those most likely to be injured or killed in a residential fire. Before I began this research on my own, the program knew of six families saved through the education materials and specialized smoke alarms. Now, by funding this new research, LSC can rest assured that you are enabling more lives to be saved along with paving a new path for Web design and usability testing. Thank you for making this research possible.
Visit ABLE Tech’s Web site, http://okabletech.okstate.edu (and select Fire Safety), for more information about the fire safety messages and DVD.