Texas School for the Deaf
Austin, Texas, USA

Contact person: Gerald Pollard pollardg@tenet.edu

At the Texas School for the Deaf, students whose only limitation is lack of hearing are now eagerly scrambling into the world of CD-ROM technology. This is a new opportunity for deaf readers because, despite large capacity for text storage, colorful graphics, animation, digital voice, and sound, CD-ROMs have had unfortunate drawbacks for the nonhearing populations. Deaf children cannot speech-read animations and often cannot understand printed captions. This situation is changing now, however, due to the efforts of Gerald Pollard and Denise Hazelwood.

With funds from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, and with the help of a Christa McAuliffe fellowship, the CD-ROM development company Human Code, and video software from Radius, Pollard and Hazelwood have developed a pair of multimedia CD-ROMs designed to meet the needs of readers with hearing impairments. The first presents the well-known children's story Rosie's Walk (published by Macmillan), and the second contains five stories from Aesop's Fables. Each of these stories is illustrated, animated, and translated into American Sign Language. In addition, each story provides instructional activities to teach topics such as vocabulary (both in English and ASL), sequencing, phonics, classification, and parts of speech.

Rosie's Walk is presented on eight similar pages. As each appears on the screen, a short animation is played showing Rosie the Hen walking through some part of a farm and being pursued by a fox. After the animation, readers can choose to go to the next page, have the text for that page translated into ASL or Signed English, view the "Secret Words" for that page, or move to the "Game Menu." Clicking on any of the secret words activates another short animation related to the selected word.

The Game Menu presents readers with choices for several instructional activities. Among other activities, readers can review translations of the story into ASL and Signed English, practice translating ASL to English, identify nouns, and prepositions, or match words and pictures.

The stories on the Aesop's Fables CD-ROM, available for both Macintosh and Windows environments, are similar in operation to Rosie's Walk, and contain activities for pronouns, sequencing, reading comprehension, synonyms, and vocabulary.

Go to index of project descriptions posted from May 1997 to June 2000