Ithaca

Abstract

As an answer to the disabled community's odyssey to gain access to adaptable, modular, multilingual, cheap and sustainable Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) products, we propose the use of the ITHACA framework. It is a software environment for building componentbased AAC applications, grounded on the Design for All principles and a hybrid-community and commercial-Open Source development model. ITHACA addresses the developers, the vendors, as well as the people who use AAC. We introduce a new viewpoint on the AAC product design-developdistribute lifecycle, and a novel way to search-select-modify-maintain the AAC aid. ITHACA provides programmers with a set of tools and reusable Open Source code for building AAC software components. It also facilitates AAC product vendors to put together sophisticated applications using the available on the Web, independently premanufactured, free or commercial software parts. Furthermore, it provides people who use AAC with a variety of compatible AAC software products which incorporate multimodal, user-tailored interfaces that can fulfill their changing needs. The ITHACA architecture and the proposed fusion of past and current approaches, trends and technologies are explained. ITHACA has been successfully applied by implementing a family of AAC products, based on interchangeable components. Several ready to use ITHACA-based components, including on-screen keyboards, Text-to-Speech, symbol selection sets, e-chatting, emailing, and scanning-based input, as well as four complete communication aids addressing different user cases have been developed. This demonstration showed good acceptance of the ITHACA applications and substantial improvement of the end users' communication skills. Developers' experience on working in ITHACA's Open Source projects was also positively evaluated. More importantly, the potential contribution of the component-based framework and Open Source development model combination to the AAC community emerged.

Using Artificial Intelligence for Augmentative Alternative Communication for Children with Disabilities

“…Many existing pictogram-based systems [1,7] use static pages that people with disabilities browse to find the appropriate images to express their thoughts and needs. A rich experience necessarily involves the use of large collections of images, thus leading to increased response time and effort to find the appropriate items [15]. Sc@ut [16] and IMLIS [17] use more than 2,200 pictograms for interaction, available on different plataforms like tablets and Nintendo DS, increasing the time needed to browse them.…”

Open Licensed AAC in a Collaborative Ecosystem

“…Open licensed Augmentative and Alternative Communication solutions and systems for those with complex speech and language difficulties, have the potential to support interventions where collaboration with localization occurs. The nature of openlicensed technologies and content also expands the options available to those living in areas where support for AAC is limited and acquiring suitable technologies can be costly [1]. However, at the time of writing, gaps still remain in the market, such as a lack of easily developed open licensed speech synthesis for text to speech in minority languages and not all multilingual AAC apps are available for Android tablets.…”

A portable application for supporting ABA intervention

“…Some studies shows that 50-80 percent of children with autism also present cognitive delay (Baird et al, 2006;Fombonne, 1999) and that most of these subjects need lifelong professional care (Billstedt et al, 2005). As yet, there are no effective, safe, and accepted medical treatments (Pangborn and Baker, 2005). This suggests the importance of an early diagnosis (by 18-24 months of life) in order to begin immediate psycho-educational intervention.…”