Communication barriers of the disabled
John Scoggin
The Signal
There is an agreed-upon notion in our society that humans are social-based creatures. The ability to idly chat up a random person, regardless of locale is something that many people, due to their disabilities may never get to experience the ease or joy of doing.
The limitations from not being able to efficiently and/or effectively communicate often forces the disabled person to watch the world pass them by while not being able to object, or often worse while being treated as inferior or ignored all together.
For some people it takes a lifetime of hard work to break down those barriers and gain recognition, not necessarily for what they have done, but simply for being a person.
Famed author, lecturer, and political activist Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing in infancy due to nerve damage from both scarlet fever and meningitis, was nearly unable to communicate until age 6. Her family hired Anne Sullivan to teach her how to talk through sign language. Keller progressed with language quickly under Sullivan’s tutorage. She learned Braille at the Perkins Institution and learned to speak at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf.
Keller went on to study at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, and to Radcliffe College, from which she graduated with high honors.
“The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important than those of blindness,” Keller once noted, as recorded by the Better Hearing Institute. “Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus– the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir, and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.”
The isolation of Keller’s inability to communicate is something that many people with disabilities can relate to, however, being blind, deaf, and/or mute are not the only disabilities that can trigger feelings of isolation.
Difficulties with social interactions can stem from a wide variety of disabilities, such as disc degeneration, as in the case of 35 year-old Christopher Alas, a graduate in general psychology.
“I am plagued by pain in [varying] degrees throughout the day,” Alas said of the 13 herniated discs in his lower back and a bulging disc in his neck.
Because Alas “cannot do any activities for more than 5 minutes without pain and [discomfort],” he has difficulty engaging in any lengthy social interactions. Moreover, he says that disc herniation causes numbness in the lower limbs, which affects his motor skills.
“This has caused some degree of paranoia that I will fall in crowded areas and be [ridiculed], which has happened,” Alas said. He fears that society will look down on him as an inferior being for his disability.
Because language and the ability to communicate are so important to today’s society, there are technologies available for those who have the inability to effectively, or easily communicate.
One such option is AT&T’s Natural Voices, a text-to-speech (TTS) product. The program starts with a database of recorded speech produced under optimum conditions with high-quality recording equipment. The individual sounds in the speech are carefully labeled so that when a new word or sentence is required, the algorithms can select the best set of sounds to retrieve from the database, joining them together to be spoken. Though this method is not perfect, much research is devoted to improving these algorithms to achieve even more natural-sounding TTS in the future. A free demo is available at the program’s website.
However, in modern times, advancements are constantly being made to aid the disabled who aren’t as fortunate as Alas. For example, there are several cheap, readily available TTS programs. One such program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a speech recognition software package developed and sold by Nuance Communications for Windows personal computers. The most recent package is version 11.5, which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. The Mac OS version is called Dragon Dictate. This program costs $9.99.
Some of these technologies are already in place at UHCL assisting those in need. “[The university has the responsibility to] ensure that students have equal access to programs. {In addition] to provide auxiliary equipment and services as needed. Examples of this would be specialized equipment CCTV, specialized software like JAWS and Kurzweil, audio/digital books/materials and interpreting and captioning services,” states Sean Murphy, UHCL’s Director of Disability Services.
These advances in technology serve as a metaphorical hammer to, at some level, wear down communication barriers that some disabled people face when overcoming their limitations and forming a healthy mutual connection with outside world. While there is still far to go to make the two halves a cohesive whole, it is a step in the right direction to make the disabled persons voice heard.
