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D1-A: Technology and Policy Watch

Tech Watch seeks to monitor developers, researchers, standards agencies, and manufacturers of mainstream technologies and to work to bring those technologies that have importance to AAC and AT devices. Based on our previous work, our State of the Science conference ,and the Demand-Pull Forum, we will begin immediately with the following activities.

Next generation speech synthesis: We are monitoring products with improved naturalness into AAC technology. Several mainstream commercial companies including AT&T, Lucent Technologies, ScanSoft and Loquendo, are working towards the development of next generation text to speech synthesis. Our goal will be to evaluate the process of these efforts and disseminate this information to the AAC industry.
Personalization of synthesized voices: We are monitoring the work of the AT&T Natural Voices group which has made tremendous advancements in natural and personalized voices. AT&T has introduced a customizable version of their text to speech engine (http://www.research.att.com). In collaboration with our Federal Lab Consortium partners who have a relationship with AT&T, we intend to continue to track developments.
New Device Display Technologies : AAC stakeholders have identified difficulty reading device display screens in adverse conditions, such as bright sunlight. We have been exploring evolving alternative display technologies within the Federal Labs.
IBM: Together with IBM's Accessibility Group, we will review advanced technologies that are being developed in IBM research facilities. Our goal will be to identify and evaluate emerging screen display technology and disseminate our findings to the AAC commercial community.
GIDEI-Up : In collaboration with Trace Center , our goal is to work with AAC manufacturers to transfer the GIDEI-Up Smart Cable as a legacy solution to interconnectivity issues often associated with serial keys. GIDEI-Up is a compact, self contained conversion device that appears as a standard HID (Human Interface Device) to the PC that is running the appropriate Windows/Mac operating systems and operates without any additional software drivers.
Technology Standards (INCITS/V2) : V2 is a technical committee of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (www.ncits.org/tc_home/v2.htm) charged with developing national standards for Information Technology Access Interfaces. While addressing the special needs of people with disabilities, our goal is to change interfaces that will have a broader market application
Medicare Education: The AAC-RERC website serves as the portal to the latest information regarding Medicare training and education materials, as well as funding guidelines. Our goal is for the AAC RERC to continue this effort, and to work with the Medicare Implementation Team to serve as the leading resource on this topic by maintaining a WWW site with current information, and with Kornreich to prepare and present webcasts in this area.
FCC Collaboration: The AAC-RERC goal is continue monitoring technical and standards compatibility that will support the ongoing integration of AAC and cellular technology-a primary AAC consumer need.
Cell Phones and AAC devices: Our goal is to monitor and influence technical and standards compatibility through the AAC-RERC Director's participation on the Advisory Board of the Wireless RERC and to provide technical assistance on connectivity to AAC manufacturers.
Web accessibility :The AAC-RERC will support the AAC commercial manufacturers' efforts through work on policy issues and design specifications that will enhance web accessibility.

For more information about this project, contact Frank DeRuyter.