Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Individuals with little or no functional speech, gesture, or writing due to underlying physical disorder may instead use a computational device, called a Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA), to produce synthetic speech (synthesized or digitized). This device affords another, albeit aided, mode of communication. Empirical evidence shows that this mode is a complement to, and not a replacement for, the other, unaided modes, such as vocalization, facial expression and gaze, and gestures of the hand, head and torso. Thus, the evaluation and design of VOCAs must take into consideration not only the issue of rate of output (e.g., words-per-minute) but also issues that relate to the utility of the individual's entire repertoire of mode strategies, of which synthesized speech is but one component. The goal of this program of research is to develop better VOCAs through the development of software techniques and modelling tools that take into account this "global" context. The research will focus on the contrastive evaluation of unimodal and multimodal interface variants, and the use of design principles based on information theory. The formal and theoretical analyses will be validated by empirical studies.