Speech Recognition/People with Disabilities

Learning Tasks
People with disabilities can benefit from speech recognition programs. This learning resource is following the Open Community Approach and therefore Open Source software is used to explore the speech recognition concept in the context of people with disabilities. The speech recognition system Simon was originally developed for people with disabilities to control a computer with voice commands.
 * (Deaf or Hard of Hearing) Explore the logic structure of Speech Recognition in this context. For individuals that are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, speech recognition software is used to automatically generate a closed-captioning of conversations such as discussions in conference rooms, classroom lectures, and/or religious services. . This allows the comprehension of voice communication and replace audible information by readable information. Elaborate this setting further and epxlain, how an interaction between hearing and deaf community members must be designed to allow the best participatory approach in the conversation with Speech Recognition. What are the requirements and constraints for the non-deaf community members in a conversation to support an inclusive setting for deaf or hard hearning participants in the discussion.
 * (Voice Control/Speech-To-Text) Speech recognition is also very useful for people who have difficulty using their hands, ranging from mild repetitive stress injuries to involve disabilities that preclude using conventional computer input devices. In fact, people who used the keyboard a lot and developed RSI became an urgent early market for speech recognition. Speech recognition is used in deaf telephony, such as voicemail to text, relay services, and captioned telephone. Individuals with learning disabilities who have problems with thought-to-paper communication (essentially they think of an idea but it is processed incorrectly causing it to end up differently on paper) can possibly benefit from the software but the technology is not bug proof. Also the whole idea of speak to text can be hard for intellectually disabled person's due to the fact that it is rare that anyone tries to learn the technology to teach the person with the disability. . Explain the PROs and CONs of a large or small vocabulary for the robustness of speech recognition.


 * This type of technology can help those with dyslexia but other disabilities are still in question. The effectiveness of the product is the problem that is hindering it being effective. Although a kid may be able to say a word depending on how clear they say it the technology may think they are saying another word and input the wrong one. Giving them more work to fix, causing them to have to take more time with fixing the wrong word.

Links/Videos

 * Youtube Video: Simon 0.4.0 Quickstart
 * Youtube Video: Simon Dictation Prototype by Peter Grasch
 * Javascript Library: Pocket Sphinx JS - Javascript library for Speech Recognition.
 * Lera Speech Recognition - Peter Grasch URL: http://grasch.net/