Devlin, S., J. Tait, Y. Canning, J. Carroll, G. Minnen and D. Pearce (1999) `The application of assistive technology in facilitating the comprehension of newspaper text by aphasic people'. In C. Bühler and H. Knops (eds.), Assistive Technology on the Threshold of the New Millennium, Assistive Technology Research Series vol. 6, Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) usually seeks to facilitate expressive communication, namely speech, in people with all manner of language difficulties. There have been few devices dedicated to the aphasic population, although this has recently started to change, in the shape of systems such as TalksBack and PCAD. This research focuses on the aphasic population but addresses a different language modality: reading. The use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques in AAC is a recent phenomenon, but the relationship between the two disciplines promises to be symbiotic: AAC providing the real life applications and test beds that NLP requires while NLP provides AAC with the means to improve performance. By involving aphasic users in our testing procedures, we believe we can produce a system that really meets the needs of aphasic readers, augmenting their residual capabilities rather than replacing the lost ability.
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