โ Scribed by J.D. Nicoud
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
We are all, at least intellectually, handicapped at various levels, and in need of technical aids to augment our knowledge, communication possibilities and physical skills. But technical solutions look especially easy to design for helping badly handicapped people. When one of man's six senses or three means of expression cannot be used, substitution channels have to be imagined. Voice can be synthesized, and the voice synthesizer can be controlled by a full or specialized keyboard. Deaf language can be learned to reach the vision sense. Three categories of devices are proposed for the handicapped to alleviate part of their motion, communication and education problems. (i) Motion is aided by wheelchairs and prosthesis; implementing adequate control is a major problem. (ii) Communication implies exchanging information through sounds, signs, characters; special devices can be built to replace the weak or missing channels, but their slowness makes communication difficult. (iii) Education implies primarily good communications, but also an adequate understanding of the development of the cognitive process and specific devices to replace what small normal children learn by themselves. Microcomputers bring a new dimensions in these fields; much remains to be discovered.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
Because of current federal legislation, educators must assess children with possible handicapping conditions and plan an individual education program for each child with a special need. Past trends are inadequate for these two purposes, and, furthermore, have placed bilingual, culturally different c