Asking the ‘bigger picture’ questions… Thinking about a sign language-based survey tool

History is a funny thing. At its simplest, it’s easy to understand. History leaves evidence, which is read by historians, who tell you what happened and when. Simple? Well no… Because even if you know lots of things that happened, and when they happened, it still only gives you little bits of information. It doesn’t really tell you very much about what was really going on… the kind of ‘bigger picture’ question.

The bigger picture question is one that makes history very complicated and here’s the reason; the people who write history often don’t think they need to explain the bigger picture. For them, it’s not important. It’s a common-sense situation that they live in all the time. It’s so normal for them that they don’t even notice it. So they don’t tell you about it.

Before I came to work at Bristol Online Surveys (BOS), I was a historian. My research was about the history of the Deaf community. Some of it was easy, simply answering questions about what happened in the past. But a lot of it was about answering the more difficult ‘bigger picture’ questions. After a while, my research became less about what happened and more an attempt to get a true idea of the ‘bigger picture’. I stopped trying to write ‘history’, and started trying to work out what it was that the people who wrote history didn’t write down because it was so normal that they didn’t even notice it.

The development of the Internet is a bit like history. It’s easy to describe in terms of what happened when. But it’s much harder to explain the bigger picture unless you find out which bits of it are so normal that we don’t even see them… That is until they cause us problems. How many times have you thought about the fact that our writing goes from left to right, and not right to left? We didn’t really… until a question about whether our online survey tool, BOS, could be made to work in Arabic had us scratching our heads.

Translating things is quite easy. You just replace one word for another. We could do that with Arabic. But the problem with Arabic is not in the character set. It’s in the inherent ‘left-to-right-ness’ of our technology, and that’s something that was so normal that we’d not noticed until it was pointed out.

Deaf people pose a similar challenge. Not ‘left-to-right’ ness. Not even ‘right-to-left’ ness. Deaf people’s challenge is so fundamental that it didn’t even occur to me until I stumbled upon some other sites that made me think. You see, Deaf people don’t normally use text. They are much happier using sign language.

So, just out of interest, I’d like to ask the question of what an online survey tool might look like if it was built by Deaf people to only use sign language.

Seeing survey tools through Deaf eyes

In all survey tools, there are two key areas to consider.

1. How you ask questions.
2. How you answer questions.

BOS already provides a way to answer the first question from a Deaf point of view. Have a look at the example below, where a question in sign language has been stored within YouTube and then embedded into BOS through a ‘note’.

Using video like this allows questions to be presented in sign. But it’s not very attractive, and it doesn’t solve the problem that the answers are still in text.

One way to resolve this problem is to change the format completely and go with something like this… from http://www.ac2.com/webdevelopment/sites/signcommunity/ (it’s worth also following the link to see how the page animates)

Although this is not a survey, you can see that it’s quite different from the first example.  The site is far more visual and puts the question in the middle and the answers around the outside. Rolling the mouse arrow over the smaller characters reveals the answers – all in sign language. The questioner can even point out the answers as part of the question.

Copying this format, and mocking up a survey question page gives something like this. This is an example of what a five-way multiple choice question might look like.

This gives us quite a good idea of what a Deaf  survey tool might look like. We’ve replaced all the question text (and some of the answers too) with video.

We still have one problem though. Surveys also have those questions that ask people to type in a longer answer. How could we replace those with something that would allow people to do the same, but in sign language?

Well, one answer might be to use something like Bristol University’s ‘SignMail’ application, available to view at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/deaf/signmail

What SignMail does is provide a very intuitive way of allowing respondents to use their own webcam to capture up to 2 minutes of signing, preview it, and then store it so that it can be viewed by others. Taking this, and integrating it into a survey page, it is an ideal replacement for free-text responses.

And the point is?

OK. What I’ve suggested is not perfect – it doesn’t even exist. But it does exist in bits that could be combined into a single tool.

However, just the fact that we’ve begun to ask the question of what it might look like is, I think, important. It does two things. It immediately makes me ask more questions which I think is a good thing.

• How do you store, analyse and report survey responses in a video format?
• How could you build this so that others can make their own surveys?
• What about surveys for other people who struggle with text…?
• … and so on.

But it also immediately makes things visible that we assumed were common sense.

• How fundamentally ‘different’ a sign language based internet might be.
• How technology is created around what we consider normal.

… and that’s the beauty of engaging with ‘bigger picture’ questions. Some of the most interesting and innovative questions occur when the things we take for granted ‘crash into’ the things that others take for granted. Sure, it’s not always comfortable. But perhaps it’s in dealing with their questions that we find a direction to follow towards our next set of challenges. And who wouldn’t want to be asking difficult questions if doing so meant that we were at the sharp end of Internet development?

Mike Gulliver

This entry was posted on 20th November 2009 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Briefings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.