Ava: Creating total accessibility for the deaf and hard-of-hearing

HealthRedesigned

Welcome to the Health Redesigned podcast by Hanno. We invite changemakers in health and wellness to share their stories about how they're using design and technology to build life-changing digital products. My name is Laila and my guest today is Pieter Doevendans. He is the co-founder of Ava, a startup based in San Francisco with a mission to empower deaf and hard of hearing people with total accessibility.

Ava has created an app that transcribes what people say into text messages, making it easier for deaf and hard of hearing people understand conversations and communicate with others. In this episode, Pieter shares his co-founders story of growing up in a deaf family, the difference between deaf and hard of hearing people, some of the early attempts and challenges of designing their app, and much more.

Episode Highlights:

• Pieter shares the mission of Ava and how there was a gap in solving the communication issues of group conversations.
• The story of Thibault and his deaf family, and how he is culturally deaf, meaning that he grew up in a sign language environment.
• Uppercase and lowercase deaf communities.
• Only two to three percent of deaf people know sign language and how there are many levels of hearing loss.
• How Ava is fully automated and focuses on the multispeaker situation which is fairly complicated and hasn’t been done before.
• How the Ava app is very similar to other messenger apps with colour codes to say who is speaking and saying what and can be read in real
  time.
• Pieter shares how they originally tried translating sign language into voice, but when they learned the challenge was understanding,
  they shifted their focus to Ava.
• Pieter shares early challenges and attempts to get the app right.
• It’s also possible to type into Ava for speech impaired people.
• In the beginning stages, they interviewed about 300 people and the great thing about social enterprise is that people are willing to
  help.
• There is a page on the Ava website about how the app has changed people’s lives. How Ava has been a lifesaver for people in emergency
  situations.
• How helping people is motivating for Pieter.
• There is a new improved version of Ava being released and it will enable anyone to use Ava even without the app.
• To support the Ava community refer friends and think about what you can do to make environments more accessible.

Resources:

• Ava
• Ava on Twitter @AvaScribe
• Ava on Facebook
• Ava on Instagram @AvaScribe

Listen to this HealthRedesigned podcast episode on Hanno's website