Augmentative, Alternative, and Assistive: Reimagining the History of Mobile Computing and Disability

“New machines give the silent a chance to speak,” read the headline of an article in Newsday profiling the Nassau United Cerebral Palsy Treatment and Rehabilitation Center in Roosevelt, New York. The center was training disabled individuals to use computerized communication aids, specifically adults and children who were unable to speak or had minimal speech due to developmental or acquired impairments. Said Salvatore Gullo, the center’s executive director, “With the development of all this new electronic technology, it became apparent that there were more ways to get nonverbal people to communicate and put them in more contact with their environment, with their families and their peers.”¹ Another article in the Wall Street Journal echoed that hopeful sentiment. It profiled a Long Island man who created a charity to provide pricey communication technologies to nonspeaking autistic children. “It’s amazing how difficult life is when you can’t communicate,” he was quoted as saying, “and this gives them a voice.”²

The two articles speak volumes about the rhetoric of revolution embraced by technophiles in the digital age,³ the discourse of technology as an equalizer of access and opportunity for individuals with disabilities,⁴ and the notion of “voice” as both symbolizing human speech and serving as a powerful metaphor for agency and self-representation.⁵ Each piece sings the praises of consumer electronics companies (Texas Instruments and Apple, respectively) and their mobile communication products with speech output capabilities (the TI Vocaid and the Apple iPad).

However, despite common themes and almost interchangeable quotes, the two pieces were published nearly 30 years apart, in 1983 and 2011. This article explores the linked histories and sociocultural implications of the Vocaid and the iPad. Through this brief case study, I argue that developments in mobile computing and advancements in electronic communication aids for nonspeaking individuals are inherently intertwined through the history of their research, development, commercialization, use, and reuse. Although disability is often underrepresented in the history of computing,⁶ it has played, and continues to play, a significant role in how computers augment and provide alternatives to human communication and expression.

Augmenting Mobile Communication History

Many nonspeaking individuals use technologies commonly referred to as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices to augment other forms of communication (such as nonverbal gestures and non-lexical sounds such as laughter) and as an alternative to oral speech.⁷ AAC devices range from low-tech (picture cards and plastic communication boards) to high-tech versions (computers like those used most famously by physicist Stephen Hawking and film critic Roger Ebert). Electronic AAC systems provide individuals with significant expressive language impairments (due to disabilities such as autism, cerebral palsy, and traumatic brain injury) with tools for selecting words, symbols, and images to communicate their thoughts and converse with others through digitized and/or synthetic speech.

Prior to microcomputers, electronic AAC devices tended to be stationary and custom built at a cost of $15,000 to $50,000.⁸ Early electric communication aids took the form of special systems to control typewriters through alternative inputs (such as a straw that sends signals to a device through inhales and exhales).⁸ Priced at $2,000, the Phonic Ear HandiVoice, developed in 1978, was the first portable commercial voice output communication aid.⁹ It came in two versions: one with a keyboard for words, pictures, and symbols and another with a calculator-like keyboard that required users to learn hundreds of three-digit codes in order to speak a single word.¹⁰ Contrary to its name, the four-pound HandiVoice was not easily handheld; rather, “saying something with this device was like chiseling words into a stone tablet,” noted one user.¹¹

Canon and TI were motivated to enter the assistive communication aids market in the late 1970s and early 1980s because of their advancements in microelectronics. US legislation such as the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, which would purportedly fund such assistive technologies, also incentivized the companies.¹² In 1977, Canon introduced the Canon Communicator, a portable tape typewriter “for...