Increasing disabled people’s ability to communicate with others is probably the most vital—and exciting—sector in accessibility today.
Hold your smartphone and consider how you interact with it: seeing the screen, speaking to others, hearing content, touching icons. But for people with sensory and physical disabilities, the worlds opened by technology can remain closed off.
The companies and innovators below leverage tech in mobile phones, computers and beyond to let people communicate like never before—whether through text-to-speech (and the other way around), creating voice through eye movements, or ever-increasing other functions. When they get avatar sign-language interpreters to work, watch out.
Gallaudet
Gallaudet University
Christian Vogler and Melissa Malzkuhn
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Gallaudet University’s research results in practical technology that can be used by the deaf and hard of hearing. Christian Vogler directs the Technology Access Program, which helps companies make products work for that audience. “People don’t want separate communication technologies that are built just for deaf and hard of hearing people,” Vogler says. “We want to use the same technology that everybody else does.” Google Live Transcribe for captions, downloaded by 1 billion people, is a collaborative project with Gallaudet, and Vogler’s work has led to the ability to text 911 and Real Time Text transcriptions on nearly every smartphone. Melissa Malzkuhn directs the Motion Light Lab, with projects including a bilingual reading system for sign language using tablets, now boasting more than 70 storybooks, in 10 countries, downloaded about half a million times; improving sign language recognition by motion capture technology; an animated show with a signing character for YouTube Kids; and VR sign language technology and content. “It is critical to have fluent signing avatars, and that is what we have been building toward,” she says.
Courtesy of Eduardo Jauregui
Irisbond
Eduardo Jauregui
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Communicating fluidly is difficult for people with ALS, cerebral palsy and other diseases that affect vocal cords and the steadiness of hands on keyboards. Irisbond creates eye-tracking systems that allow people to type and select options on Apple and Windows computers and other devices through only eye movements, and render input into controls or speech—their own, if prior recordings exist. More than 5,000 people currently use the technology, primarily in Europe. The company pushed the Spanish government to pay for this type of assistive technology for the first time, and 1,000 users there now use it for free. “We enable them to talk with the eyes,” says Eduardo Jauregui, cofounder and CEO. “They can communicate independently.” New AI integration makes the system predict what the user is attempting to say or accomplish, creating faster and smoother communication. Up next: Expanding into the US market, where technologies like these are often covered by Medicare, and using their eye-tracking technology to identify early warning signs of cognitive diseases.
NV Access
Michael Curran
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To interact with websites, documents and programs, blind people must use screen-reader software. Unfortunately, basic readers included with operating systems often don’t go much beyond reading first-level text and menus, and advanced commercial screen-reader software can be expensive: up to $1,200. So blind friends Michael Curran and James Teh decided they would solve the problem by making their own more powerful screen reader and distribute it for free. “It’s software that can provide independence for the blind person in terms of access to shopping and banking and socializing and email and all that stuff that we all take for granted these days,” Curran says. Thus, the Australian charity NV Access and its NVDA reader for Windows were born. Today NV Access serves more than a quarter-million people worldwide in more than 60 languages and more than 170 countries, roughly splitting the market with the biggest commercial option (JAWS, whose maker Vispero is another member of the Accessibility 100). More than 200 blind and vision-impaired people work voluntarily on NVDA’s open-source code.
Courtesy of PRC-Saltillo
PRC-Saltillo
Sarah Wilds
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Many disabilities impede a person’s brain signals from activating the muscles required for speech—cerebral palsy, Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis and traumatic brain injury, among others. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices such people to create artificial speech through a tablet controlled by head movement, eyes or even blowing through a straw. (Not unlike how Stephen Hawking did, but far more advanced.) PRC-Saltillo is an AAC industry leader through hardware and software used by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Those whose complex speech skills are no longer accessible because of paralysis or disease can choose letters, words and phrases that are then converted into sound. For young children, who might not yet know the alphabet, screens with icons depicting water, books, emoticons and other items can allow them to communicate emotion and desire to the outside world in ways once unthinkable.
Courtesy of Sorenson Communications
Sorenson Communications
Paget Alves
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To make a simple phone call, people who are deaf and hard of hearing rely on captioning services and other assistance that often require a landline. Sorenson Communications is the market leader in communication services for that scenario through assistive devices, software and video relay services that offer on-screen ASL interpretation in real time. (The company provides 600 million minutes a year of captioning alone.) Sorenson now uses VOIP internet connections, mobile apps and other modern tools; for example, a confidential pilot program with a major U.S. bank lets a customer scan a QR code and get an app that provides instant ASL interpretation for conversations with branch personnel. “The volume of the number of transactions and the amount of time far exceeded our expectations,” CEO Paget Alves says. “There’s a real demand for this.” Next up: basic virtual ASL translation, likely in 2027.
Tobii Dynavox
Tara Rudnicki
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For the vast majority of people, “point and click” means controlling a cursor via a traditional handheld mouse. But a person with paralysis, cerebral palsy or other disabilities must move that cursor through other means—like a wheelchair-mounted joystick, eye control, even subtle movements of their tongue. The global leader in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), Tobii Dynavox creates the interfaces that bring those input methods to life, often through iPads souped up by powerful software that are mounted on wheelchairs. For example, a quadriplegic can use their eyes so precisely as to type on virtual keyboards three feet away. Then, for people who cannot speak, whole sentences can be spoken in many languages and voices—sometimes the user’s own, if it has been archived by another Tobii Dynavox product, Acapela.
University Of Illinois Beckman Institute
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
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Voice recognition, which is often trained on speech from professional audiobook narrators, can provide amazing control of smart devices—unless your voice is affected by a disorder or injury. Because of this, error rates in speech recognition of compromised voices once topped 75%. To address this, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson founded the Speech Accessibility Project at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute, and collected recordings of more than 1,100 hours of speech from 1,500 voices that were compromised by Parkinson’s, ALS, cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome and strokes. His new dataset has been used to knock altered-voice error rates down to 6%, and has been shared freely with 70 other research and commercial institutions, including Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. “We’ll distribute it under a data use agreement to anybody anywhere in the world who has a good idea for improving accessibility,” he says. “The greatest barrier is simply reaching people and convincing them that they should get involved in the project.” Beyond Hasegawa-Johnson’s work, the University of Illinois has also long stood out as one of the top developers of Paralympic athletes and adaptive-sport research.
Courtesy of Joris Castermans
Whispp
Joris Castermans
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As mentioned above, speech loss, whether caused by disability (cerebral palsy, a stutter) or illness (cancer, Parkinson’s), can make it extraordinarily difficult to communicate via phone or videoconference. “People change their behavior,” Whispp founder Joris Castermans says. “When you lose your voice, you ask your wife to call the hospital or make a reservation. You just don’t do it anymore, because people just can’t hear you.” If the person can only whisper, Whispp’s free AI-driven phone app takes the low-decibel, hushed words and converts them into a much louder and clearer voice. Also, if a person knows that their voice will soon be compromised (because of throat surgery, for example) Whispp allows them to store their original voice and have a version of that used forever. Launched at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show, the Whispp app already has thousands of monthly active users.
