Jemima:
Communication
[Under
development 16 May 2005 ]
Jemima can read English quite well, although her
reading age may be five or six years behind her chronological age. She reads
the subtitles on the television, on her VHS and DVD videos, and at the cinema.
Jemima asks for books and teenage girls’ magazines to read, and enjoys reading
them to herself, asking about any words or meanings she finds difficult to
understand. Whilst she has a substantial library of her own, she also enjoys
visits to the local public lending library. She has countless books signed to
her, including all the Harry Potter books. Our means of communicating with
Jemima is predominantly through British Sign Language (the same principle as
American Sign Language, but completely different signs). She also lip-reads
English words which she knows well, "chocolate" being the first.
Jemima's principal means of communicating with us
is by attempting to speak. However, her articulation is so poor that despite
our best efforts, understanding her is largely context-dependent, supplemented
with liberal quantities of trial and error. It is partly in this context that
we consider it vital that Jemima is in receipt of regular speech therapy. (See
page on cerebral palsy for why this provision was not made until recently.)
From the earliest age, Jemima has eye-pointed to
where whatever it is she wants is located. As a method of communicating with a
child this is okay, but things are trickier when she considers more abstract
concepts.
The way forward was indicated
to us in August 1995 in one of the Commensal
vegetarian restaurants in
It is great importance that she is encouraged in
her physical production of words, rather than words reproduced through people
she perceives as more powerful than herself. Clearly
this is a challenge, but unless this challenge risen to by the adults who
surround this vulnerable little girl, she can never fully become the person,
the self-willed, creative, expressive person, for which she has the potential.
Jemima can be helped to use a computer keyboard
to type letters. This tends to be a very slow process, and involves many mis-hit keys. However, using this method, Jemima can write
short stories, an activity she enjoys a lot. She has written some poems about
her pets: Sound Signs.
She also has a computer peripheral device called
a Playball, designed by IBM for children to use
instead of a mouse. Like an upside down mouse, with a hand-sized ball, this is
useful in children's graphic-based programs, although Jemima still finds it
very hard to control.
Thanks to charitable fundraising by a local
bakery chain, Jemima and one her classmates were each given a state of the art
portable computer called a Dynavox. Using this
equipment, linked to a voice-activated switching system, Jemima is able to
produce both text and synthesised speech. Although the process of text/speech
production is very slow, and requires a lot of patience, the machine's computer
voice is much more intelligible than Jemima's speech production. We hope, soon,
to link her Dynavox to a printer, so that she can use
it to write out her stories. The vocabulary on the Dynavox
is hers, new words from her world being programmed into the machine
periodically. The machine displays picture icons, selected by Jemima from a
range, highlighting each icon in turn (scanning) until Jemima makes a vocal
sound into a microphone, at which point the scanning stops and the icon is
selected. On a text line, the machine displays the word represented by the
icon. Deep nesting of menus permits both a wide range of vocabulary and
conceptual association. The Dynavox is nothing like a
panacea, and many people who are familiar with information technology would be
appalled at how weak technological development and implementation is for people
with severe communication problems. Hats off, all the same,
to the developers, manufacturers and suppliers of Dynavox.
