VOCAs: Assistive Technology for People with Speech Impairments

“More important than the right to speech is the right to speak.” The world renowned British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking knows this exactly to be true.

Having been robbed of his ability to speak to a motor neuron disease, Stephen Hawking had to struggle with crude communication systems just to be able to tell his wants and needs…until he discovered VOCAs.

If it had not been for VOCAs, Stephen Hawking’s insights into the nature of space and time would not have been known.

This assistive technology has allowed him to communicate, write and publish his works, and give lectures to live audiences around the world in spite of losing his ability to speak.

In this post we will explore what VOCAs are and how these instruments give people an ability that most of us take for granted.

What are VOCAs?
VOCAs refer to voice output communication aids. These are electronic devices used by people who are either unable to speak or whose speech is difficult to understand.

VOCAs are used for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The term refers to different communication methods used by people who are unable to speak, have difficulty speaking, or have restrictions in understanding spoken or written communication.

Who uses VOCAs?
VOCAs are used by people who have limited or absent speech to communicate with the people around them. These include people who suffer from neurological disorders, such as autism, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and epilepsy.

VOCAs are also used to help an individual regain his ability to speak that might have been lost due to stroke, brain damage, or a motor neuron disease. An example of a motor neuron disease is Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, which Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.

Are there different types of VOCAs?
Just as there are different types of people who use VOCAs, there are also different types of VOCAs. These vary in all shapes, sizes, and complexity.

Dedicated Communication Devices vs. Communication Software Programs

VOCAs may be dedicated communication devices or laptop computers with specialized software installed.

Dedicated communication devices are designed primarily for communication, while computer based VOCAs are typically programmed to include additional features, such as an environmental control system.

An environmental control system allows the VOCA user to independently turn on electronic devices, such as the lights or television, via remote control.

Speech
Some VOCAs use digitized speech or a recorded natural speech of a person for voice output. Frequently used words, phrases, or sentences are recorded and stored into the device by somebody else other than the VOCA user. The VOCA user then pushes a button or turns a switch to play the message.

A VOCA with digitized speech can only say what someone has already recorded into it. However, they are easier to program than the VOCAs that use synthesized speech.

VOCAs that use synthesized speech make use of a speech synthesizer to produce artificial speech. These VOCAs use text to speech systems. This type of device is more flexible because users are not dependent on pre-recorded messages on their device. The speech synthesizer can say any combination of words, phrases, or sentences that the user chooses.

Representation of Messages
VOCAs may use text-based or symbol-based programs to represent messages on the device. Symbol-based VOCAs use pictures or symbols to represent messages which are supplied through symbol organizational systems. This type of device is typically used by individuals whose literacy level makes it difficult for them to use text-based VOCAs.

Text-based VOCAs typically have a keyboard for entering messages. They often feature a “word prediction” facility which helps reduce the number of keystrokes a user has to make. It also functions as a support tool for people whose spelling is not consistently reliable.

How are VOCAs accessed and controlled?

VOCAs can be adjusted according to its user’s needs.

Buttons
Some people that use VOCAs have fine motor skills and they are able to press buttons on the devices. Adjusting the sensitivity of buttons and keyguards can help VOCA users that may have limited motor skills. Keyguards are plates that sit above the buttons of a VOCA device or a keyboard. They help the user to press the right key with more precision.
Switches

People that have limited fine motor skills input messages to a VOCA device through visual scanning. This technique is used by Stephen Hawking. Professor Hawking uses a switch to move through the letters on an onscreen grid. He then presses the switch to select the letter that he wants.

Other Access Methods used in VOCAs
Other access methods include:

• a standard mouse;
• mouse that can be controlled by the head;
• joysticks; and
• rollerballs.

Conclusion
It is truly hard to imagine living a life of silence, where your thoughts and dreams stay locked within you. VOCAs have given people with communication problems the freedom to express themselves and live life fully.

Listen up: Does Abnormality in auditory processing underlie dyslexia

People with dyslexia often struggle with the ability to accurately decode and identify what they read.

Although disrupted processing of speech sounds has been implicated in the underlying pathology of dyslexia, the basis of this disruption and how it interferes with reading comprehension has not been fully explained.

Now, new research published by Cell Press in the December 22 issue of the journal Neuron finds that a specific abnormality in the processing of auditory signals accounts for the main symptoms of dyslexia.

"It is widely agreed that for a majority of dyslexic children, the main cause is related to a deficit in the processing of speech sounds," explains senior study author, Dr. Anne-Lise Giraud and Franck Ramus from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France.

"It is also well established that there are three main symptoms of this deficit:

• difficulty paying attention to individual speech sounds, 
• a limited ability to repeat a list of pseudowords or numbers, and 
• a slow performance when asked to name a series of pictures, colors, or numbers as quickly as possible.

However, the underlying basis of these symptoms has not been elucidated."

Dr. Giraud and colleagues examined whether an abnormality in the early steps of auditory processing in the brain, called "sampling," is linked with dyslexia by focusing on the idea that an anomaly in the initial processing of phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can be used to make a word, might have a direct impact on the processing of speech.

The researchers found that typical brain processing of auditory rhythms associated with phonemes was disrupted in the left auditory cortex of dyslexics and that this deficit correlated with measures of speech sound processing.

Further, dyslexics exhibited an enhanced response to high-frequency rhythms that indirectly interfered with verbal memory.

It is possible that this "oversampling" might result in a distortion of the representation of speech sounds.

"Our results suggest that the left auditory cortex of dyslexic people may be less responsive to modulations at very specific frequencies that are optimal for analysis of speech sounds and overly responsive to higher frequencies, which is potentially detrimental to their verbal short-term memory abilities," concludes Dr. Giraud.

"Taken together, our data suggest that the auditory cortex of dyslexic individuals is less fine-tuned to the specific needs of speech processing."

Speechless: Arcola Theatre London

An extraordinary story of two girls struggle to be heard

Shared Experience (Bronte, After Mrs Rochester, Jane Eyre) presents the astonishing story of identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons.

Refusing to speak to adults, the twins communicate in their own private language, their only relationship being an intense and turbulent bond with each other. 

Speechless is a powerful portrayal of the twins secret world and their struggle to find a voice against all odds.

The winner of a Fringe First Award 2010, Speechless is directed and co-written by Artistic Director of Shared Experience, Polly Teale. 

Celebrated for her potent visual and imaginative style, Polly won the Evening Standard Award for Best Director for her own play After Mrs Rochester, which also won the Time Out Award for Best West End Production.

Arcola Theatre London

Speaking and Understanding Speech Share the Same Parts of the Brain

The brain has two big tasks related to speech: making it and understanding it.

Psychologists and others who study the brain have debated whether these are really two separate tasks or whether they both use the same regions of the brain.

Now, a new study, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that speaking and understanding speech share the same parts of the brain, with one difference: we don't need the brain regions that control the movements of lips, teeth, and so on to understand speech.

Most studies of how speech works in the brain focuses on comprehension. That's mostly because it's easier to image the brains of people who are listening quietly; talking makes the head move, which is a problem when you're measuring the brain.

But now, the Donders Institute at the Radboud University Nijmegen, where the study was conducted, has developed technology that allows recording from a moving brain.

Laura Menenti, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, co-wrote the paper along with Peter Hagoort of Radboud University Nijmegen and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Sarah Gierhan and Katrien Segaert.

Menenti was initially interested in how the brain produces grammatical sentences and wanted to track the process of producing a sentence in its entirety; looking not only at its grammatical structure but also at its meaning.

"What made this particularly exciting to us was that no one had managed to perform such a study before, meaning that we could explore an almost completely new topic," says Menenti.

The authors used functional MRI technology to measure brain activity in people who were either listening to sentences or speaking sentences.

The other problem with measuring brain activity in people who are speaking is that you have to get them to say the right kind of sentence.

The authors accomplished this with a picture of an action -- a man strangling a woman, say -- with one person coloured green and one coloured red to indicate their order in the sentence.

This prompted people to say either "The man is strangling the woman" or "The woman is strangled by the man." (The experiments were all carried out in Dutch.)

From this, the researchers were able to tell where in the brain three different speech tasks (computing meaning, coming up with the words, and building a grammatical sentence) -- were taking place.

They found that the same areas were activated for each of these tasks in people who were speaking and people who were listening to sentences.

However, although some studies have suggested that while people are listening to speech, they silently articulate the words in order to understand them, the authors found no involvement of motor regions when people were listening.

According to Menenti, though the study was largely designed to answer a specific theoretical question, it also points towards some useful avenues for treatment of people with language-related problems.

It suggests that while it sometimes seems that people with comprehension problems may have intact production, and vice versa, this may not necessarily be the case. According to Menenti, "Our data suggest that these problems would be expected to always at least partly coincide.

On the other, our data confirm the idea that many different processes in the language system, such as understanding meaning or grammar, can at least partly, be damaged independently of each other."

Google speech recognition software on Android

If you've tried speech-recognition software in the past, you may be skeptical of Android's capabilities. Older speech software required you to talk in a stilted manner, and it was so prone to error that it was usually easier just to give up and type.


Today's top-of-the-line systems—like software made by Dragon—don't ask you to talk funny, but they tend to be slow and use up a lot of your computer's power when deciphering your words. Google's system, on the other hand, offloads its processing to the Internet cloud.


Everything you say to Android goes back to Google's data centres, where powerful servers apply statistical modeling to determine what you're saying. The process is fast, can be done from anywhere, and is uncannily accurate.


You can speak normally but if you want punctuation in your email, you've got to say "period" and "comma", you can speak for as long as you like, and you can use the biggest words you can think of. It even works if you've got a regional accent.

How does Android's speech system work so well? The magic of data. Speech recognition is one of a handful of Google's artificial intelligence programs—the others are language translation and image search—that get their power by analysing impossibly huge troves of information.


For the speech system, the data accesses a large number of voice recordings. If you've used Android's speech recognition system, Google Voice's e-mail transcription service, Goog411 (a now-defunct information service), or some other Google speech-related service, there's a good chance that the company has your voice somewhere on its servers and it's only because Google has your voice, and millions of others, that it can recognise mine.

Read more here: Google speech recognition software for your cellphone actually works. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

Getting the Most Out of Speech Recognition Software

Many people feel speech recognition isn't good enough for every day use, but several devotees couldn't live without it. If you're looking to start using speech recognition, here are some tips to make it more effective.

Speech recognition isn't perfect but you can achieve nearly 100% accuracy with a few tricks. For starters, replace the provided headset with a better one. The provided headset is normally a compromise on quality against price.

The most important thing to remember is, to always correct the software by your voice. When you type or use the keyboard, it doesn't learn.

We humans learn to understand language through repetition, so the software needs to learn that way as well.

You want to teach it to learn your natural speech patterns, so be patient, talk normally, and correct by voice when necessary.

Beginners to speech recognition software tend to speak loudly, or slowly, or in short bursts but speech-recognition apps are designed to transcribe normal speech. Think ahead so that you can utter complete sentences or phrases and then say it conversationally.

If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7, you already own an excellent, little-known dictation app. Windows Speech Recognition is not quite as accurate as Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and of course you have to supply your own microphone but it lets you dictate into any program.

Windows SR also has a great interactive tutorial, and it even lets you control menu commands and mouse clicks. It’s a great way to see how you might get along with speech recognition without spending any money.

Speech recognition, mobile apps help build reading skills

Students’ scores on a national reading assessment have remained relatively flat for nearly 40 years, with students ages 9-17 scoring an average of 255 points on a scale of 0 to 500. As educators work hard to bring that average up, many are excited about the potential for new technologies to help.

Some schools, for example, are using tools such as speech recognition technology to give students a personal reading coach inside the classroom. Others are taking advantage of mobile technology to help students build the skills they need for reading fluency in their spare time, wherever they might be, by downloading audio books or applications to their mobile phones or mp3 players.

“Technology changes the whole game,” said Matt Walker, vice president of sales and marketing for Recorded Books, a company that provides audio books and other products for schools.

Meanwhile, there is new research to suggest that this approach can be successful: A PBS study found that mobile applications can help increase students’ vocabulary. That could be welcome news for educators who have seen students’ reading scores remain largely flat in national exams.

Long-term trend results in reading from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are available on the National Center for Educational Statistics web site for 12 assessment years, going back to the first in 1971.

The average reading score for 9-year-olds was 220 points in 2008, increasing 4 points since 2004 and 12 points in comparison to 1971. While the average score for 13-year-olds in 2008 was higher than in both 2004 and 1971, it was not significantly different from the scores in some assessment years in between, at 260 points. The average reading score for 17-year-olds was higher in 2008 (286 points) than in 2004 (283 points) but was not significantly different from the score of 285 points in 1971.

Scientific Learning Corp.’s Reading Assistant software aims to change that. The program is a guided oral reading tool that is used to build fluency. The software uses speech verification technology to monitor for signs of difficulty in reading—which include hesitations, silence, mispronunciations, and other cues—and provides assistance when students stumble or get stuck.

“Reading Assistant was developed with the idea of bringing additional reading tutors to students through computers,” said Maura Deptula, projects manager for Scientific Learning. “The computer can listen to students the way a teacher can and prompt the student when he or she gets stuck.”

The software automatically calculates a student’s fluency rate, and there is a direct correlation between fluency and comprehension, said Liz Kline, product manager for Reading Assistant. The software not only helps teachers identify problem areas but also allows them to make sure each student’s reading has been assessed.

Read the full article here