Usable technology for the differently abled-hearing impairment

Hearing loss poses a serious challenge to access information that are in the form of audio or video on the internet. Text subtitles or closed captioning is a popular mechanism to make the audio embedded in the videos accessible to the hearing impaired. Alternatively, a sign language interpreter may translate the audio into sign language gestures. However, these aids are either expensive or technologically infeasible. In this paper, we propose a technique to enable a person with hearing impairment see the audio. The novel assistive tool is envisioned as a visual aid for the hearing impaired to comprehend the audio contained in a video. The tool produces a speech synchronised visual lip movement sequence for a video. The lip movement sequence is then superimposed onto and displayed along with the original video. A number of experiments have been conducted to determine the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed visual aid.