Vernacular Education and Communication Tool for the People with Multiple Disabilities

The population with severe speech and motor impairments (SSMI) depend solely on the Augmentative and Alternative Communication Techniques (AAC) for their education and communication needs. Unfortunately, the AAC tools are expensive with respect to the Indian people and the language being English is not usable by the majority of the population. Also, the AAC technique being essentially icon-driven, the icons need to socioculturally relevant to the Indian population. In this paper, we present an overview of one education tool and a communication tool that caters to the multilingual need. We also present an access switch mechanism and a corresponding GUI tuned to the access mechanism, for replacing the mouse, which requires finer motor control – an ability absent in most of the people with SSMI. The proposed systems are indigenous and affordable as well.