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 that included Stewart and Patrick Dickson, a professor of education at the university. They designed the program to supplant conventional ASL dictionaries, which convey the gestures of signing with static drawings that are usually difficult to interpret. Instead the program translates English words into short video clips of ASL signs, a format that is easier to use and thus better suited to fast-paced classroom discussions. It can also translate whole stories.
In addition, deaf students and their teachers can interact on chat screens and save the conversations for further study. This allows a deaf child to take the Personal Communicator home and go over the day’s classroom activities or homework assignments with his or her parents, says Heeter. The team is now working on increasing the program’s repertoire of ASL signs from the 1,000 it currently has to 2,500 by the summer of 1996.
