Communication devices for people with disabilities

Patients who are hospitalized and are without voice would like to participate in
their care. This requires clear communication. Speak for Myself™ (SFM) was developed
for use at the bedside so that communication may be facilitated between patient and nurse when the patient is voiceless. The objective of this study was to evaluate Speak for Myself™ at the bedside and to measure the outcomes. This was a mixed methods, one group pre-test-post-test, quasi-experimental study. Twenty adult patients in three
hospitals in South Florida agreed to use Speak for Myself™ during their acute care
hospital stay (M = 8.86 hours). This group of participants (n = 20) ranged from 45 to 91
years old (males = 14; females = 6). Of the participants, 15 (75%) self-identified as
European American, 2 (10%) self-identified as Hispanic, 2 (10%) self-identified as
African American, and 1 (5%) self-identified as Asian. Ten of the participants (50%)
were in respiratory failure. Two (10%) were receiving oxygenation measures related to
unspecified complications of their illnesses. Of the remaining eight participants (40%),
one each was receiving oxygenation measures due to atrial fibrillation, arteriosclerotic
heart disease, cardiogenic shock, endocarditis, neck abscess, renal failure, status post
seizure activity, and tongue metastasis.

With the exponential increase of Internet usage and the embedding of multimedia content on the Web, some of the Internet resources remain inaccessible for people with disabilities. Particularly, people who are deaf or Hard of Hearing (HOH) experience inaccessible Web sites due to a lack of Closed Captioning (CC) for multimedia content on the Web, no sign language equivalents for the content on the Web, and an insufficient evaluation framework for determining if a Web page is accessible to the Hearing Impaired community. Several opportunities for accessing content needed to be rectified in order for the Hearing Impaired community to access the full benefits of the information repository on the Internet. The research contributions of this thesis are to resolve some of the Web accessibility problems being faced by the Hearing Impaired community. These objectives are to create an automated CC for the Web for multimedia content, to embed sign language equivalent for content available on the Web, to create a framework to evaluate Web accessibility for the Hearing Impaired community, and to create a social network for the Deaf community. To demonstrate the feasibility of fulfilling the above listed objectives several prototypes were implemented. These prototypes have been used in real life scenarios in order to have an objective evaluation of the proposed framework. Further, the implemented prototypes have had an impact to both the academic community and to the industry.