Asynchronous video telephony for the Deaf

Abstract

The South African Deaf community has very limited telephony options. They prefer to communicate in sign language, a visual medium. Realtime video over Internet Protocol is a promising option, but in reality, the quality is often not enough for the Deaf to be able to understand each other’s sign language. Furthermore, these applications were not design specifically for the Deaf. This paper introduces an asynchronous video chat system to provide better quality video at the expense of increased latency. It determined a codec/transmission protocol combination in the laboratory environment and tested it out with actual Deaf users. This paper will address the results based on comparison between different codecs, transmission protocol on asynchronous video communication for the Deaf.