Reimagining the Augmented Reality Accessibility Ecosystem for Deaf Students: Service Provider Perspectives in Experiential Learning

In experiential learning environments like chemistry labs, Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students often face the "split-attention effect," where they must choose between focusing on dangerous or complex hands-on tasks and looking at an interpreter or captioner. While Augmented Reality (AR) has been proposed to solve this by overlaying communication directly into the student's field of view, most research focuses solely on the student's experience. This study evaluates ARRAE (Augmented Reality Real-Time Access for Education), a system that provides multi-camera views to support personnel, by analyzing the perspectives of an instructor, an ASL interpreter, and a real-time captioner in a simulated lab.

The study found that AR-mediated access fundamentally changes the roles of support staff. Unlike traditional remote access, which often relies on a single, limited camera view, ARRAE provides providers with multiple perspectives of the student's workspace. This enhances the provider's contextual awareness, allowing them to better understand the student's progress and pace their communication accordingly. However, this shift creates new challenges: instructors reported a loss of oversight, as they could no longer easily monitor the captions or interpreter feedback to gauge whether the student was following along.

While AR integration reduces the need for students to physically shift their gaze between tasks and communication, it introduces new coordination overhead. The study highlights a tension between student-centered access and instructor control. For example, while the AR system successfully keeps information persistent—allowing students to refer back to instructions while working—it also requires more complex setup and camera management. The findings suggest that AR should not be viewed as a standalone replacement for in-person or remote services, but rather as a component of a hybrid ecosystem where different modalities balance access, control, and coordination differently.