Development and preliminary results of the University of Salford media Accessibility and hearing Impairment Database (U-SAID)

Recent technological advances in object-based broadcasting present the opportunity to improve broadcast accessibility, particularly for the 11 million people in the UK with hearing impairment. Taking advantage of this opportunity is important given the key social role television plays, especially for older people. To best exploit this opportunity, a greater understanding is required of the relationship between different types of hearing impairment and the specific barriers to broadcast access they present. To begin deconstructing this relationship the University of Salford has assembled a database, which this paper describes. This database compromises of comprehensive data about individuals’ hearing loss as well as quantitative and qualitative data about their experience with television speech. This paper describes the databases’ development and methodology, as well as preliminary results from the first 13 data-sets. Potential applications and plans for its open source released will also be outlined