Investigating the usability of conceptual learning application

Hearing capacity is given bestowed to humans. The significance is underappreciated in its presence. However, children with hearing loss feel challenges to be faced in learning and moving socially. According to National Institute of Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) survey three children out of 1000 are born deaf in the United State but generally diagnosed between 2-5 years. Deaf education has come a long way since its inception in 15th century. Most common educational approaches available for deaf children include bilingual-bicultural, auditory/oral, and total communication. First approach uses a sign language, second approach without it, while the third approach combines visual communication and auditory. There is need for further investigation on education to deaf children by building applications and investigating the usability of them. In this information age, this research focuses on the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and web technologies bestowed by Web 2.0 for developing software which can leverage e-Learning process for deaf children. Microsoft .NET platform with ASP.NET technology and C# programming language are used to build web application for teaching deaf children the language basics. The application is intuitive with appropriate use of multimedia. It has two roles such as teacher and student with respective functionalities. The outcome of the research is the software which can run in PC and handheld devices to provide good learning experience to deaf children. A web based portal has been built for educating deaf children to learn language basics. The usability of the conceptual learning application has been investigated and the results revealed that the web portal is usable and having intuitive user interface.