Publications by authors named "Deborah I Fels"

Live captioning is a challenging task that requires intense concentration to convert audio to text in real-time. Despite the importance of live captioning for accessibility, little is known about the subjective workload of captioners in this context. This study aimed to measure the subjective workload of live captioners using the NASA-TLX and to explore the factors that contribute to their mental workload.

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Audio description (AD) is one of the main methods that people who are blind or low vision (B/LV) use to access film, television, and theatre content. AD is a second audio track inserted into the space(s) where speech is absent, which tends to be only a few seconds. Contained in that second track is an audio description of the important visual information contained within a specific scene.

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Two experiments investigated deaf individuals' ability to discriminate between same-sex talkers based on vibrotactile stimulation alone. Nineteen participants made same/different judgments on pairs of utterances presented to the lower back through voice coils embedded in a conforming chair. Discrimination of stimuli matched for F0, duration, and perceived magnitude was successful for pairs of spoken sentences in Experiment 1 (median percent correct = 83%) and pairs of vowel utterances in Experiment 2 (median percent correct = 75%).

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Five experiments investigated the ability to discriminate between musical timbres based on vibrotactile stimulation alone. Participants made same/different judgments on pairs of complex waveforms presented sequentially to the back through voice coils embedded in a conforming chair. Discrimination between cello, piano, and trombone tones matched for F0, duration, and magnitude was above chance with white noise masking the sound output of the voice coils (Experiment 1), with additional masking to control for bone-conducted sound (Experiment 2), and among a group of deaf individuals (Experiment 4a).

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Storytelling is an important method of communication at all stages of life. Sharing narratives about lived events and experiences provides topics of conversation and opportunities for connecting with other people. In this article, we apply a conventional model of storytelling to the verbal reminiscences of older people with a dementia diagnosis.

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The WORLD WIDE WEB has changed the way people interact. It has also become an important equalizer of information access for many social sectors. However, for many people, including some sign language users, Web accessing can be difficult.

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