Assistive Technologies

A special place into assistive technologies is taken up by the speech recognition and speech synthesizer, which can be used by many different users, persons with visual, language or mobility disabilities. For many years soft developers have been concerned by speech recognition and text-to-speech because we assist to great changes in informatics area and accessibility is the main condition in the creation of assistive software applications.speech recognition, text-to-speech, assistive technologies, accessibility

Use of an agile bridge in the development of assistive technology

Engaging with end users in the development of assistive technologies remains one of the major challenges for researchers and developers in the field of accessibility and HCI. Developing usable software systems for people with complex disabilities is problematic, software developers are wary of using user-centred design, one of the main methods by which usability can be improved, due to concerns about how best to work with adults with complex disabilities, in particular Severe Speech and Physical Impairments (SSPI) and how to involve them in research. This paper reports on how the adoption of an adapted agile approach involving the incorporation of a user advocate on the research team helped in meeting this challenge in one software project and offers suggestions for how this could be used by other development teams

Increase Apparent Public Speaking Fluency By Speech Augmentation

Fluent and confident speech is desirable to every speaker. But professional speech delivering requires a great deal of experience and practice. In this paper, we propose a speech stream manipulation system which can help non-professional speakers to produce fluent, professional-like speech content, in turn contributing towards better listener engagement and comprehension. We propose to achieve this task by manipulating the disfluencies in human speech, like the sounds 'uh' and 'um', the filler words and awkward long silences. Given any unrehearsed speech we segment and silence the filled pauses and doctor the duration of imposed silence as well as other long pauses ('disfluent') by a predictive model learned using professional speech dataset. Finally, we output a audio stream in which speaker sounds more fluent, confident and practiced compared to the original speech he/she recorded. According to our quantitative evaluation, we significantly increase the fluency of speech by reducing rate of pauses and fillers

Integrating user-centred design in the development of a silent speech interface based on permanent magnetic articulography

Abstract: A new wearable silent speech interface (SSI) based on Permanent Magnetic Articulography (PMA) was developed with the involvement of end users in the design process. Hence, desirable features such as appearance, port-ability, ease of use and light weight were integrated into the prototype. The aim of this paper is to address the challenges faced and the design considerations addressed during the development. Evaluation on both hardware and speech recognition performances are presented here. The new prototype shows a com-parable performance with its predecessor in terms of speech recognition accuracy (i.e. ~95% of word accuracy and ~75% of sequence accuracy), but significantly improved appearance, portability and hardware features in terms of min-iaturization and cost

Tech for Understanding: An Introduction to Assistive and Instructional Technology in the Classroom

This paper examines the different types of assistive and instructional technology available to students who are classified with one or more of the thirteen disabilities outlined in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (referred to as, IDEA). While the roles of assistive and instructional technology are different, there are many instances where their uses may overlap. Thus, while these two categories will be discussed separately, it should be noted that some information may be applied to each category and more than one piece of technology. The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the world of assistive and instructional technology for those who may be new to its concepts, particularly parents who have recently learned that their child may benefit from extra assistance and future educators who are interested in learning more about the devices they will be using to reach their students. Each of the thirteen disabilities will be discussed briefly, and then each disability will be assigned several types of assistive and instructional technology that serve it well. This will by no means be an exhaustive list of all types of technology available to teachers, parents, and students. However, it will attempt to provide a varied glimpse at some of the options that are available and how they may help children who are struggling to access the curriculum

HCI for the deaf community: developing human-like avatars for sign language synthesis

With ever increasing computing power and advances in 3D animation technologies it is no surprise that 3D avatars for sign language (SL) generation are advancing too. Traditionally these avatars have been driven by somewhat expensive and inflexible motion capture technologies and perhaps this is the reason avatars do not feature in all but a few user interfaces (UIs). SL synthesis is a competing technology that is less costly, more versatile and may prove to be the answer to the current lack of access for the Deaf in HCI. This paper outlines the current state of the art in SL synthesis for HCI and how we propose to advance this by improving avatar quality and realism with a view to ameliorating communication and computer interaction for the Deaf community as part of a wider localisation project