Design of an Iconic Communication Aid for Individuals in India With Speech and Motion Impairments

Abstract India is home to a large number of individuals with significant speech and motion impairments. Many of these individuals are children and neo-literates who have little proficiency in their language of communication. In order to cater to such individuals in India, we have developed Sanyog, an icon-based communication aid. Sanyog accepts a sequence of icons as input and converts the input sequence to a grammatically correct sentence. Conversion of an iconic sequence to a sentence requires linguistic knowledge and resources that are not available for Bengali and Hindi, the two Indian languages for which Sanyog was developed. To overcome this problem, we have developed a novel user-computer interaction model. The interaction is facilitated by a suitably designed interface. The interaction model and the interface designed for Sanyog are presented in this article.

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