A Route Planner Interpretation Service for Hard of Hearing People

The advancement of technology over the past fifteen years has opened many new doors to make our daily life easier. Nowadays, smart phones provide many services such as everywhere access to the social networks, video communication through 3G networks and the GPS (global positioning system) service. For instance, using GPS technology and Google maps services; user can find a route planner for traveling by foot, car, bike or public transport. Google map is based on KML which contains textual information to describe streets or places name and this is not accessible to persons with special needs like hard of hearing people. However, hearing impairment persons have very specific needs related to the learning and understanding process of any written language. Consequently, this service is not accessible to them. In this paper we propose a new approach that makes accessible KML information on android mobile devices. We rely on cloud computing and virtual agent technology subtitled with SignWriting to interpret automatically textual information on the map according to the user current position.