Usability Exploration of the Visual Textual Imaging

The lack of access to verbal communication with non-deaf individuals is a major problem for the profoundly deaf people. The goal of our work was to develop communication techniques through graphical imaging of textual information for the profoundly deaf and hard-of- hearing people. Our empirical research was focused on an exploration the visibility of proposed pseudo-graphic typeface in comparison with five conventional phonetic typefaces. Our results show that Impact and Styled typefaces were perceived easier and seemed to be rather legible than Courier, Arial, Comic and Times New Roman. The tachistocopic analysis of the amount of recognized token (target stimulus) among distractors showed that subjects had fewer recognition difficulties with target stimulus among distractors for Arial and Times New Roman typefaces. For font attractiveness, Comic was perceived as being more attractive than Arial and Courier, while Styled and Impact were perceived as more attractive than Times New Roman. Of the fonts studied, Impact and Styled appear to be the more visible. Besides, being the most preferred they could be perceived fairly preattentively. We suppose that the proposed Styled typeface may have wider applications such as public display systems for dynamic imaging of current financial events in stock exchanges or present environments with different constraints.