A mobile survey for collecting data from Deaf people who use sign language for communication

Hearing researchers and practitioners might have encountered challenges in collecting data from Deaf people who mainly rely on sign language for communication. This could be due to language barriers and the non-user-friendly interface of paper and text-based questionnaires. In an attempt to overcome such challenges, this paper proposes a solution using a mobile questionnaire that operates on smartphones useable by relevant researchers and practitioners to utilize for data collections in Deaf communities. This mobile survey was a result of a design participatory method that involved a multidisciplinary team in Design, Development, Testing, and Deployment stages. This paper provides a brief description of the high-level view of the first three stages. The paper further elaborates on the Deployment stage to address the use of this mobile survey when collecting data from Deaf communities in Western Cape, South Africa. The mobile usage patterns of Deaf people were implemented as a use case to implement the proposed data collection instrument.