Word Cloud for Meeting: A Visualization System for DHH People in Online Meetings

Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people have limited access to auditory input, so they mainly receive visual information during online meetings. In recent years, the usability of a system that visualizes the ongoing topic in a conference has been confirmed, but it has not been verified in a remote conference that includes DHH people. One possible reason is that visual dispersion occurs when there are multiple sources of visual information. In this study, we introduce “Word Cloud for Meeting,” a system that generates a separate word cloud for each participant and displays it in the background of each participant’s video to visualize who is saying what. We conducted an experiment with seven DHH participants and obtained positive qualitative feedback on the ease of recognizing topic changes. However, when the topic changed in a sequence, it was found to be distracting. Additionally, we discuss the design implications for visualizing topics for DHH people in online meetings.