Exploring AI Opportunities in Deaf Education: Understanding Design Needs Through Teacher and Parent Perspectives in Bangladesh

Paper Title

Exploring AI Opportunities in Deaf Education: Understanding Design Needs Through Teacher and Parent Perspectives in Bangladesh

Publication Info

• Topic area: AI-driven educational technology for Deaf learners in low-resource contexts.
• Keywords: Deaf education, Bangla Sign Language, AI design, low-resource contexts, visual access, linguistic stability, emotional safety, participatory design, Global South, inclusive learning.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Current AI-driven educational technologies often fail to address the linguistic, infrastructural, and social realities of Deaf learners in low-resource settings, particularly in non-Western contexts like Bangladesh.
• Significance: Addressing these gaps is critical to improving educational equity for Deaf students, ensuring accessibility, and fostering inclusive learning environments in the Global South.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has focused on sign language recognition, translation tools, and accessibility technologies, primarily for high-resource languages like ASL. However, these systems often assume stable infrastructure and standardized sign corpora, which do not align with the realities of Bangla Sign Language (BdSL) classrooms. This study builds on HCI and Universal Design for Learning principles to explore how AI can stabilize learning conditions in fragile educational environments.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Conceptualizing AI as mediated, access-stabilizing support rather than autonomous translation, with design principles grounded in the lived experiences of Deaf students, teachers, and parents in Bangladesh.
• Novelty:
  1. Introducing the concept of "fragile learning continuity" to explain how visual, linguistic, and infrastructural instability interact in low-resource Deaf education.
  2. Reframing AI as a tool for stabilizing access and trust through teacher-guided validation, emotional safety, and alignment between school and home practices.
  3. Developing culturally informed design principles for BdSL-focused AI tools, emphasizing offline functionality, expressive signing, and community governance.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted qualitative interviews and focus groups with 13 teachers, 8 parents, and 5 Deaf students to understand their challenges, needs, and expectations.
  • Used reflexive thematic analysis to identify themes such as visual disruptions, vocabulary gaps, emotional hesitation, and infrastructural constraints.
  • Proposed AI design principles that prioritize continuity, trust, and cultural alignment over performance optimization.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Visibility disruptions, evolving BdSL vocabulary, and infrastructural instability frequently co-occur, creating cascading comprehension gaps.
  • Emotional safety is critical in signed classrooms, as misunderstanding is publicly visible, increasing hesitation to seek clarification.
  • Students prefer private clarification tools, culturally grounded visuals, and offline-capable systems to support learning continuity.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Shifts AI design focus from feature optimization to maintaining continuity under unstable conditions, addressing gaps in existing models for Deaf education.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Semi-structured interviews and focus groups with teachers, parents, and students in urban and peri-urban Bangladeshi schools.
  • Analysis highlighted systemic interactions between visual, linguistic, and infrastructural factors, shaping AI design priorities.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited representation of rural Deaf education contexts in Bangladesh.
  • Findings are based on conceptual expectations rather than evaluations of functional AI prototypes.
  • Future work should focus on deploying prototypes, developing BdSL academic vocabulary, and expanding co-design efforts with Deaf students.

Summary

This study investigates how AI can support Deaf education in Bangladesh by addressing challenges such as fragile visual access, inconsistent BdSL vocabulary, emotional hesitation, and infrastructural instability. It introduces the concept of "fragile learning continuity" and reframes AI as mediated support rather than autonomous translation. Through qualitative insights from teachers, parents, and students, the study proposes design principles emphasizing offline functionality, expressive signing, cultural grounding, and community governance. These findings contribute to inclusive HCI and AI design, offering practical guidance for developing tools that stabilize learning in low-resource contexts.