HLT and communicative disabilities: The need for co-operation between government, industry and academia

To improve the position of people with communication disabilities, it is first essential to identify the tools they require to improve their communicative capabilities. HLT can be instrumental in restoring functions and compensating for impairments by providing solutions that integrate knowledge of speech and language into automatic processes. Against this background, an initiative was taken of analysing the specific needs of communicatively disabled people in terms of applications and related HLT resources so as to identify a minimum common set of HLT resources that would be useful for developing applications for a number of communicative disabilities. The priorities set in this survey could be used to inform policy, research and development and eventually stimulate take-up by industry. In this paper we describe this approach.