Small app Big Love, specially designed for hearing impaired people

The popularity of mobile phones, communication between people is convenient, micro-letter came out, moving fingers can send a paragraph voice to express your thoughts. However, these for the Deaf people, the basic meaningless, their world is still silent, cold. Recently on next, someone has recommended an app voice for people with hearing impairment, for the deaf people cannot hear, cannot say these two difficulties, with the HKUST news fly cooperation, do the text and the speech between the transformation, facilitates the deaf person life, lets the deaf person's world warm a little.

The voice now looks like a "simple rough" application, the interface is far from exquisite, the function is also very concise, but in the user experience also under the Kungfu, very suitable for the deaf people to use. One of the most obvious points is the split-screen design, the deaf person typing at the same time as he typed the word to rotate 180 degrees to the average person, can greatly improve the hearing impaired expression of the efficiency of the idea.

According to the voice of their own revealed, relying on word-of-mouth transmission of natural growth, the current active 200~300 hearing impaired, the month active 1500 people. To achieve this result, the team of several people also spent a lot of effort and energy. One of the biggest difficulties is to gain the trust of early-seeded users. The voice of Zhu said that they started to know very little hearing impaired, deaf people as vulnerable groups are also very sensitive to strangers very distrust, will think they are liars. To solve this problem, on the one hand, they pass on trust by intermediaries who are trusted by the deaf, such as the teachers of the school of Deafness, the head of the sign language community, and on the other hand, show that they really want to help the disabled, put themselves in the same position and listen to their needs and solve the problem.

In addition to these solutions, the most difficult problem for this kind of commonweal project is sustainable development. To the disadvantaged groups to do the nature of the product is not suitable for the entrepreneurial nature of equity investment, the disadvantaged groups are also very difficult to charge, coupled with the less easy to attract technical elites to join the maintenance of products, the sustainable development of the project is a great challenge. Ultimately, it is necessary to explore a sustainable business model that can win and benefit the disadvantaged and attract investors willing to support the development of voice products.

After solving the basic communication needs of face-to-face communication, television watching and telephone calls, the voice also hopes to further address the pain points in the work and learning scene of the hearing-impaired, helping the deaf to earn their own living, and truly helping the disabled to elevate their self-esteem and social status.

This simple software is a ThoughtWorks user experience designer and iOS, Android development engineers, in their spare time to do a project, the first version is written in HTML code, embedded in the PhoneGap run, only spent a weekend on the release. After a thorough understanding of the hearing impaired, they also made a revision, and now these versions have been compared to the use of hearing impaired people.

At the end of the interview, Zhu also said a few interesting points, there are fun, interesting, but also helpless: there is a hearing loss of the user is very fond of voice in their own home speech recognition to do vocal practice, to see their words are not allowed (their voice organ is good, have the ability to speak, but no hearing will let them sound distortion) A user with the voice of the continuous speech recognition function for the design of the video tutorials without subtitles to translate subtitles, self-study knowledge, help improve work ability. And people will often ask them, "How's Your blind app doing lately?" This also makes them realize that "deaf" person's social existence feeling is too low, is the vulnerable group which everybody ignores, also needs like the voice such product, to let their life better, lets their world warm so a little.