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 an alternative communication technique through graphical imaging of textual information for the profoundly deaf and hard-ofhearing people. Our empirical study was focused on a visibility exploration of new pseudo-graphic typeface and its comparison with five conventional phonetic typefaces. The results showed that Impact and Styled typefaces were perceived easier and seemed to be rather legible than Courier, Arial, Comic and Times New Roman. The tachistoscopic analysis of the number of recognized tokens among distractors showed that subjects had fewer recognition difficulties for Arial and Times New Roman typefaces. Styled and Impact were perceived as more attractive than Times New Roman. And being the most preferred, they could be perceived fairly preattentively. 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.