Cisco Grant

The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, following the recommendation of the Cisco Accessibility Team, has just granted the NTID Center on Access Technology a $100,000 award for a first year of what is anticipated to be a multi-year effort. Bill Clymer, Interim Director of the Center on Access Technology, is PI, and Gary Behm and colleagues from NTID and the other RIT colleges will provide a team of experts to consider the application and adaptation of the ways in which CISCO products can benefit communication access for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. The three research strands will

• examine the state of the art and provide recommendations related to 911-411-211 telephone response systems
• evaluate possible use of avatars to enhance direct communication support for deaf and hard-of-hearing users
• evaluate Cisco TelePresence technologies for classroom and remote communication for deaf and hard-of-hearing users

During the first year, faculty at NTID and RIT will form teams, review the literature and state-of-the-art on CISCO access technologies, set up and test the various CISCO technologies in RIT/NTID laboratories, conduct focus groups and community demonstrations, gather and analyze expert opinion, and prepare whitepapers for each strand, including recommendations for future efforts in these areas. After the first year of work, the team will review progress and findings and determine which current or possibly new research would be most fruitful, and will make recommendations for continued research and development to CISCO.

The common thread among the three research strands will be the identification of local RIT experts in related fields to refine and focus their expertise on the specific telecommunication challenges facing deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. With RIT/NTID faculty expertise in deafness, access technologies, computers, engineering, software development and business, and with the collaboration of appropriate individuals at Cisco, the project team anticipates that the results of this research will encourage Cisco to consider the needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers in future products.