Overview Of Technology To Establish The Goals Of A Person With Disability

As technology has developed, the greater it has helped humans – especially ones with disabilities. Accessibility and usability plays a big part in the use of people with disabilities being able to use technology. Accessibility essentially means ‘fullest use of any resource should be given to the greatest number of people’(1 source, 5 page) this would also apply especially to people with disabilities as to reach the highest number of people, they would need to be considered when making the resource. Usability is ‘the measure of a product’s potential to accomplish the goals of the user’(2) in the case for people with disabilities, would need to have special features to accomplish the goals that they require. It could be said that ‘usability problems

This technology allows the user to talk through an input device so that words appear on a screen (speech to text). This is particularly useful for people with disabilities such as ones that make typing on a keyboard difficult, impossible or are deaf. Speech Recognition was first investigated during the late 1920s by scientists such as Harvey Fletcher of whom believed it was possible to ‘provide aids for those partially deaf’ (5, xiv) and in order to achieve this goal stated ‘there must be an evolution toward even greater perfection’(5, xiv) this would therefore mean that devices which converted sound into an electrical signal such as microphone would have to be developed further in order to allow speech to be converted into text on a screen. The way this is able to work is that the words spoken have ‘a reference pattern for each word to be recognized is stored as a time pattern of linear prediction coefficients (LPC)’ (4, 67) this is a clear indication that technology has developed rapidly over the past century and with more time can only improve and aid people with disabilities further therefore enhancing their use of

This allows normal language to be converted into speech and spoken to the user through a sound output device such as speakers. Text to speech would usually aid those with visual impairments or the blind. However this technology does not come without problems as ‘a spoken sentence is very different from a sequence of words uttered in isolation’(6, 738) this means that although the spoken words in a sentence would make sense, it fails to convey a genuine dialogue of a human being. Furthermore, this is emphasised as it is stated that ‘in a sentence, words are as short as half their duration when spoken in isolation’ (6, 738) the result of this would be that even a normal sentence would take much more time than it should take and this would therefore not be at its maximum efficiency nor be pleasant for the user. In order to improve upon this, instead of words being spoken and concatenated together into a sentence – ‘thousands of sentences are needed’(7) this is achieved as an ‘actor reads these sentences under strict supervision by a trained phonetician’(7) allows the speech to be more fluent however it still asks the question of how it could convey a genuine dialogue suitable for humans. To accomplish this the computer ‘will try to choose the best recording clips, from all the recorded sentences, that match the text and piece these together to create new computer-generated speech’(7) this allows normal sentences to