Accessibility efforts for d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) learners in video-based learning have mainly focused on captions and interpreters, with limited attention to learners' emotional awareness--an important yet challenging skill for effective learning. Current emotion technologies are designed to support learners' emotional awareness and social needs; however, little is known about whether and how DHH learners could benefit from these technologies. Our study explores how DHH learners perceive and use emotion data from two collection approaches, self-reported and automatic emotion recognition (AER), in video-based learning. By comparing the use of these technologies between DHH (N=20) and hearing learners (N=20), we identified key differences in their usage and perceptions: 1) DHH learners enhanced their emotional awareness by rewatching the video to self-report their emotions and called for alternative methods for self-reporting emotion, such as using sign language or expressive emoji designs; and 2) while the AER technology could be useful for detecting emotional patterns in learning experiences, DHH learners expressed more concerns about the accuracy and intrusiveness of the AER data. Our findings provide novel design implications for improving the inclusiveness of emotion technologies to support DHH learners, such as leveraging DHH peer learners' emotions to elicit reflections.

Previous research underscored the potential of danmaku–a text-based commenting feature on videos–in engaging hearing audiences. Yet, for many Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) individuals, American Sign Language (ASL) takes precedence over English. To improve inclusivity, we introduce “Signmaku,” a new commenting mechanism that uses ASL, serving as a sign language counterpart to danmaku. Through a need-finding study (N=12) and a within-subject experiment (N=20), we evaluated three design styles: real human faces, cartoon-like figures, and robotic representations. The results showed that cartoon-like signmaku not only entertained but also encouraged participants to create and share ASL comments, with fewer privacy concerns compared to the other designs. Conversely, the robotic representations faced challenges in accurately depicting hand movements and facial expressions, resulting in higher cognitive demands on users. Signmaku featuring real human faces elicited the lowest cognitive load and was the most comprehensible among all three types. Our findings offered novel design implications for leveraging generative AI to create signmaku comments, enriching co-learning experiences for DHH individuals.

The think-aloud protocol is an effective method frequently used by designers and researchers to understand how users interact with computing systems. However, there is limited research on the use of this method with deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) populations, especially in virtual settings. In this paper, we investigate the behaviors of DHH participants in virtual think-aloud sessions to better understand the challenges of conducting this type of research with this population. We conducted twelve virtual think-aloud sessions with DHH participants using Zoom, and we gathered feedback from surveys, interviews, and observations. Our results identified DHH behaviors leading to a lack of clarity in think-aloud data, such as asynchrony between signing and navigating the interfaces, as well as the use of visual descriptive signs instead of explicit terminology to ambiguously refer to interface components. Based on our findings, we provide methodological and design implications to help researchers effectively carry out virtual think-aloud studies with DHH participants (e.g., when and how to prompt for clarification).

Learners' awareness of their own affective states (emotions) can improve their meta-cognition, which is a critical skill of being aware of and controlling one's cognitive, motivational, and affect, and adjusting their learning strategies and behaviors accordingly. To investigate the effect of peers' affects on learners' meta-cognition, we proposed two types of cues that aggregated peers' affects that were recognized via facial expression recognition:Locative cues (displaying the spikes of peers' emotions along a video timeline) andTemporal cues (showing the positivities of peers' emotions at different segments of a video). We conducted a between-subject experiment with 42 college students through the use of think-aloud protocols, interviews, and surveys. Our results showed that the two types of cues improved participants' meta-cognition differently. For example, interacting with theTemporal cues triggered the participants to compare their own affective responses with their peers and reflect more on why and how they had different emotions with the same video content. While the participants perceived the benefits of using AI-generated peers' cues to improve their awareness of their own learning affects, they also sought more explanations from their peers to understand the AI-generated results. Our findings not only provide novel design implications for promoting learners' meta-cognition with privacy-preserved social cues of peers' learning affects, but also suggest an expanded design framework for Explainable AI (XAI).