CHENNAI: "If you want to know what it is like to be unable to speak, there is a way. Go to a party and don't talk. Here is what you will find: people talking behind, beside, around, over, and through, and even for you, but never with you. You are ignored until finally you feel like a piece of furniture," said Rick Creech. This is the story of many people who cannot communicate their needs through verbal means.Vidya Sagar, a voluntary organisation based in Chennai, inaugurated the celebrations of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Week on Monday. AAC strategies describe the way people supplement their communication when they cannot speak clearly enough to be understood by those around them. During the week, Vidya Sagar plans to create an awareness on the importance of enabling non-verbal people to communicate.Director of Vidya Sagar, Rajul Padmanabhan, said that being non-verbal is the most dis-enabling feeling. “Being human means being able to communicate. It has taken so long for people to realise the importance of this rehabilitation,” she said. Addressing AAC needs will consequently take care of education, literacy, employment and advocacy needs, she added. Stressing on the need for funding, Rajul said, “NGOs ask for funding to push communication devices into the market because the government is not doing it. I wish the government starts distributing such devices,” she said.On the occasion, Cognizant Foundation donated five Avaz devices to Vidya Sagar. Avaz is a portable speech synthesizer, which captures movement by the use of a touch-screen or an external switch and allows the user to create text sentences on the device using predictive software, and is thus an artificial voice for the child. Ajit Narayanan, Founder and Managing Director of Invention Labs, the company that designs Avaz, said, “One of my mentors used to tell me that technology is only the pickle to solve a problem, it is not the main course.”GR Arvind, a 10th grade student of Vidya Sagar, proposed the vote of thanks using an Avaz device. The importance of communication is summed up by Daniel Webster in the AAC brochure given by Vidya Sagar: "If all my possessions were taken away with one exception, I choose to keep the power of communication, for by it, I would soon regain all the rest."
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