The STAUT-Reader, making general-purpose texts accessible to deaf

• Aníbal C. de Oliveira Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE)
• Francisco C. M. B. Oliveira Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE)
• Eudenia M. Barros Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE)
• Adriano T. de Freitas Instituto Federal do Ceará (IFCE)
• Thiago A. C. de Araujo Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE)
• Lidiane C. Silva Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/cbie.sbie.2015.762

Resumo

Deaf students have difficulty in reading texts written in languages whose mode is oral-auditory, such as Portuguese. As users of a signed language, it is harder for them to obtain information contained in books, magazines and newspapers. For this purpose, we have built the STAUT-Reader, an electronic reader, designed to help deaf to read texts written in Portuguese. The tool uses a Rule-Based Machine Translation system to produce output texts in a written representation of Libras, the Brazilian Sign Language. To investigate our proposal, we conducted an experiment using a counterbalanced within-subjects design to evaluate the reading performance of deaf readers using our tool. The results showed to be promising, especially for non-oralized deaf.

Palavras-chave: Deafblindness, Libras, Electronic reader, Rule-based translation

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