David Stewart remembers when he was the only deaf child in his elementary school, and the shame he felt in being different. He could speak but not always clearly enough for people to understand him. To avoid the inevitable taunts of schoolmates, he would keep silent, sometimes for a year at a stretch.
Now an associate professor of educational psychology and special education at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Stewart has helped devise a computer program that gives deaf students more options to fall back on should the spoken word elude them. Called the Personal Communicator, it combines an English dictionary, a dictionary of American Sign Language, and a voice synthesizer. With this program, a nervous student can type answers at a keyboard and let the computer speak them aloud to the class.
Carrie Heeter, director of Michigan State’s Communication Technology Laboratory, wrote the software and led a team ...
