Hello,
At my work, there is a new deaf-sighted employee who cannot speak very
well. Since I'm totally blind and don't know the American Sign Language, I
find it very hard to communicate with him.Do you know if there exists a
device on which you can type what you want to say  and have it spoken
outloud by a speech synthesizer? This way the person could "Talk" to their
entourage and they could respond by typing back and have the sentence
appearing on a screen (or Braille Display). Is there such a device and how
much does it costs? Otherwise, do you have any suggestion on how to ease
communication? I think he can read on lips but sometimes he doesn't
understand my accent, I think.

It is paradoxal that this problem arises in this work place, because we are
a language research Center which attempts to teach language to primates
(Chimpanzees and Bonobos). The keyboard that the animals are using has
symbols that look like japanese characters and both the humans and the Apes
point to those symboles when they want to communicate something. Sedrick,
the deaf person is now learning the keyboard so we may be able to use that
as I have a brailled copy of it. But there are only 360 words on it, most
of which are foods so we won't be able to have very interesting
conversations if we just use that. I don't really have to communicate with
Sedrick (we don't work on the same domain), but I find it interesting to
try.
        Thanks for your suggestions,

                        Sincerely,
                        Severine Renard


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