Podcasting has become a significant medium, contributing to domains such as delivering news and entertainment, enriching learning and education, and supporting advocacy and community development. Nowadays, podcast production is no longer limited to professionals with high-end equipment, and amateurs and independent creators produce their own episodes. Technological advances have driven this shift of making podcast production widely available, especially for audio engineering — the craft of recording, manipulating, and reproducing sound. However, research is limited on the accessibility of audio engineering for podcast creation, particularly by deaf and hard of hearing (dHH) individuals. To fill this gap, my dissertation aims to investigate the creation of podcasting by dHH individuals focusing on audio engineering. This research consists of three phases: (1) understanding the current state of accessibility in audio engineering by dHH individuals, (2) identifying the practice of sound design tasks for podcasting in detail, and (3) co-designing and evaluating prototypes to support sound design tasks with dHH individuals. My primary contributions aim to gain a deeper understanding of the creative practices of audio engineering by dHH individuals and to explore design considerations and techniques for accessible audio engineering, specifically relevant to sound design tasks. I envision empowering the dHH individuals' creations through auditory mediums.
Keita Ohshiro (Thu,) studied this question.