Design of an Iconic Communication Aid for Individuals in India With Speech and Motion Impairments

Abstract

India is home to a large number of individuals with significant speech and motion impairments. Many of these individuals are children and neo-literates who have little proficiency in their language of communication. In order to cater to such individuals in India, we have developed Sanyog, an icon-based communication aid. Sanyog accepts a sequence of icons as input and converts the input sequence to a grammatically correct sentence. Conversion of an iconic sequence to a sentence requires linguistic knowledge and resources that are not available for Bengali and Hindi, the two Indian languages for which Sanyog was developed. To overcome this problem, we have developed a novel user-computer interaction model. The interaction is facilitated by a suitably designed interface. The interaction model and the interface designed for Sanyog are presented in this article.

KEYWORDS:

• augmentative and alternative communication
• compansion
• decision state
• iconic communication
• query-response model
• user state

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by Media Lab Asia, Delhi. We thank the students and teachers of the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy, Kolkata, India, and Action for Ability Development and Inclusion, New Delhi, India for field testing of Sanyog

Notes

1. Census of India, 2001, available at http://www.censusindia.gov.in.

2. We have used the Bengali and Hindi TTS in Sanyog, both with the same name—Shruti—developed at the Communication Empowerment Laboratory, Kharagpur (http://www.cel.iitkgp.ernet.in).

3. See, for example, http://www.evertype.com/standards/by/bliss.html, which contains links to work on using Bliss symbols for AAC.

4. The icons are provided by the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy (Kolkata, India), which is an NGO working with children with speech and motor disorders.

5. The markers used in Sanyog are provided by the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy (Kolkata, India).

6. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official\_languages\_of\_India for details.