Understanding How Deaf and Hard of Hearing Viewers Visually Explore Captioned Live TV News

Captions blocking visual information in live television news leads to dissatisfaction among Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) viewers, who cannot see important information on the screen. Prior work has proposed generic guidelines for caption placement but not specifically for live television news, and important genre of television with dense placement of onscreen information regions, e.g., current news topic, scrolling news, etc. To understand DHH viewers' gaze behavior while watching television news, both spatially and temporally, we conducted an eye-tracking study with 19 DHH participants. Participants' gaze behavior varied over time as measured by their proportional fixation time on information regions on the screen. An analysis of gaze behavior coupled with open-ended feedback revealed four thematic categories of information regions. Our work motivates considering the time dimension when considering caption placement, to avoid blocking information regions, as their importance varies over time.