Listen via this link, every Saturday evening from 8pm.

Our User Centre groups, including STG, had been affected, as had been so many other groups, by not being able to meet face to face during lockdown. STG successfully rose to the challenge of keeping up meeting by exploring and implementing video group calls. This can indeed be a challenge when your video conferencing platform is also your communication aid platform – all members of the STG use some form of AAC.

Read more about this challenge or even better, join the group at the CM Conference – registration is now open – for a presentation on the way to not only successfully meeting online but also keeping up teaching on AAC.

In collaboration with JISC (historically known as the “Joint Information Systems Committee”), their subject specialist Rohan Slaughter worked with Professor Annalu Waller and members of the AAC Research Group to develop this programme to provide assistive technology (AT) training and development.

Rohan Slaughter: “The educational assistive technologist role is a multi-disciplinary role that draws upon the skills and knowledge base found within education/teaching, technology, and specifically assistive technology as well as health, social care and therapy approaches from occupational therapy and speech and language therapy. The role bridges all of these professional areas and has become an emergent profession itself.”

Find out more about this exciting new course and how to register on MSc EduAT page, including links to the registration page and contact details of the programme staff.

New research from the Universities of Dundee and Cambridge introduces a new context-aware method that has the potential to reduce this communication gap by eliminating between 50% and 96% of the keystrokes the person has to type to communicate. The method allows a person to quickly retrieve sentences they have typed in the past using artificial intelligence. Prior research has shown that people relying on speech synthesis to communicate tend to reuse previously typed sentences, a phenomenon observed in any personal storytelling, reusing sentences when retelling stories to new audiences. However, such retrieval or re-use in a communication aid has relied on time-consuming and tedious methods. In this new system, as the person is typing, the system automatically retrieves the most relevant previous sentences based on the text typed and the context the conversation the person is involved in. Context includes information about the conversation such as the location, time-of-day, and automatic identification of the speaking partner’s face and identify. An early prototype version of the system was demonstrated live in the TV show BBC Click.

The paper is the first to integrate context-aware information retrieval with speech-generating devices for people with motor disabilities, demonstrating how context-sensitive artificial intelligence can improve the lives of people with motor disabilities. It was published at CHI 2020, the world leading conference for Computer-Human Interaction research, where it won a Best Paper Award which is only awarded to the top 1% of accepted papers.

Georgie is a member of the Straight Talking Group (STG) here the User Centre in Computing, University of Dundee. The group supports both teaching and research and meets regularly to interact with students, lecturers and researchers.

The group also regularly reviews software and hardware for accessibility as part of our consultancy work. If you are interested in the group’s work or even want to become a member (if you are a person who uses AAC), please get in touch with Kathleen Cummins, contact details on our ‘Contact us’ page.

Eye gaze, a still relatively new technology, has changed Becky’s life in terms of enabling her to use the computer more effectively. However, accessing mainstream software using this technology can still be a challenge. Although eye gaze compatible software is still a niche market, Microsoft is now preparing its operating system Windows 10 for eye gaze support and recent tech developments by SpecialEffect have made the probably most successful computer game ever, Minecraft, eye gaze compatible.

In the seminar, Becky talked about her eye gaze journey from accessing her communication software to playing video games and creating art. She discussed her involvement in the development of EyeMine, the eye gaze accessible Minecraft, and talk about future aspirations.

Becky came to fame on BBC News for involvement in the development of EyeMine, Minecraft that can be played using only your eyes to interact with the computer.

A fascinating seminar on how user interfaces need to change when the access method changes and how users with disabilities can be involved in software development.

On the 24 August 2019, our AAC research team presented “Painting with your Eyes” and “Chat like Stephen Hawking” at V&A Dundee Technology Taster Day.

Giving visitors a chance find out more about access technology for people with physical disabilities, the highlight of the day was definitely the talk by Becky Tyler, a young woman with cerebral palsy, who has been interacting with her computer not with her hands but with her eyes. This enabled her to paint, to play and, probably most importantly, to talk!

More than 150 people came to our session in the learning studio to try out how you can paint using your eyes only or to talk by pressing only one switch.

UPDATE: A very successful AAATE conference in the warm Italian sunshine, the team returns today (2nd Sept) suitably inspired.