Father Makes an iPad App to Help His Son Speak

This is very close to the independent project I've been working on lately: http://chir.ag/ktype - my aim is to make an iPad app to help people with speech disabilities communicate better and faster. I can't wait to try out VerbalVictor. If anyone knows Dr. Pauca personally, I'd love to get an introduction. The article mentions that lots of people have contacted him lately and I'd rather not bother him if he's busy.

> ...he said, "and if it doesn't work out, they're a little bit at a loss as to what to do next. We still need to do more to help professionals understand what's available and what might be best suited for individuals."

That is also part of what KType is. I am hoping to catalog (in Wiki format) everything out there related to this topic. It doesn't matter which solution works, as long as something works. Everyone is doing their best to make something that works and it does work for a subset of the users, just not everyone. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to update my reference page with more links/resources: http://chir.ag/ktype/research:reference

Related ideas:

1. I wish that the dentist had a keyboard I could type on. I know that most people couldn't use it very effectively, but as a decent touch-typist, I could communicate with him while he's working on me.

2. A number of years ago, a friend told me about his mother who'd had surgery for throat (?) cancer, and can no longer speak normally. He rigged up for her a small (musical) keyboard, with each key corresponding to a phoneme, so she could speak with the synth. At the time he talked about wishing he had audio recordings of her own voice to use. He proposed a "voice bank" that folks could store such recordings for just such a purpose, at a nominal charge.