Design of interactive literacy activities for Deaf people on mobile devices

Abstract

Reading and writing are daily communicative activities for our integration in society. For Deaf people, whose first language is sign language, these skills result complicated. In Mexico, there is a high percentage of Deaf people who have not acquired these skills, mainly due to the lack of trained personnel and educational guidance. Our proposal aims to design a mobile application with basic exercises to support the learning of reading and writing skills for the Deaf, using as a starting point their knowledge of the words in Mexican Sign Language (LSM, in Spanish). For the development of the proposal, we used the design thinking method, which includes the stages: empathize, define, devise, prototype. The low fidelity prototype was tested by an expert in LSM and teaching Spanish to deaf students. The results suggest that the activities are coherent and adequate for the Deaf user to appropriate the written words, and that the prototype has a clear flow.