Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

Software creator Walter Woltosz got a mysterious phone call from Cambridge University in 1985, shortly after he started selling a computer system he had designed to allow severely disabled people to write and even “speak” by manipulating a single button.

News of the system had reached the caller, who wondered if it might be right for “a very bright fellow” at the English university who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The caller would not tell Woltosz who the bright fellow was.

But Woltosz thought he knew.

“I said to him, ‘If it’s Stephen Hawking, I’ll donate whatever he needs,’ ” recalled Woltosz, sitting in his Palmdale office off a dusty road in the High Desert.

Back then, Hawking, now a celebrity scientist, was not well known outside scientific circles. But Woltosz, an engineer with a love of physics, had long been a fan of the wheelchair-using scientist.

The caller thanked him politely and hung up. A few minutes later, he called back to say: “Stephen Hawking would like to try your system.”

It was a pivotal moment in the lives of both Hawking and Woltosz. The celebrated physicist, who had been found to have the disease in 1963, had just had his vocal cords removed in order to help him breathe.

His speech, badly slurred for several years, was now gone. And he no longer had the strength to use a pen or type.

Suddenly, one of science’s greatest minds was isolated from the world.

Woltosz and his wife had left their secure jobs to devote all of their time and resources to the computer system Woltosz had invented. At the time of the call, Woltosz, formerly an aerospace engineer, was working without salary to help keep the company going.

Hawking quickly took to the system, using it to return to his life of lecturing and conferring with colleagues.

“Without this software or something like it,” Hawking said in a recent interview, conducted via e-mail, “I would have been cut off and unable to carry on as a physicist.”

He also used the software to write his hugely successful book, “A Brief History of Time” (1988), which led to appearances on television and in films, making his digitized voice famous all over the world.

In the book’s acknowledgments, he paid tribute to Woltosz’s work. “With this system,” he wrote, “I can communicate better now than before I lost my voice.”

That statement helped build Woltosz’s company from a two-room operation into a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

“He has done so much in publicity for us over the years,” said Woltosz, 52, of Hawking. “Here was a person who was working on such a phenomenally high level and had so much to offer the world. That we were able to take part in enabling him to work gave us a badge of credibility.”

There are now at least half a dozen firms producing computer speech and writing systems for the disabled. These systems are especially vital to people with Lou Gehrig’s disease, about 75% of whom lose the ability to speak.

“It has made a dramatic change in how these people live,” said David Beukelman, a professor at the University of Nebraska and a leading researcher in the field called augmentative and alternative communication.

“The technology came about just at the time when society started to look differently upon disabled people. Before the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were considered people to be cared for and shielded from the world,” Beukelman said.

“The changing attitudes, plus the technology, have made a huge difference in how disabled people are included in society.”

Woltosz learned from his mother-in-law, Lucy Evans, the frustrations of a person with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which leaves the mind sharp while breaking down the body. Evans came down with the disease in 1978 and, within two years, could no longer speak or write.

“She had been a strong communicator,” Woltosz said, “very outspoken. It was very hard for her to be without words.”

Woltosz was then working as an engineer and manager at United Technologies in Sunnyvale, near San Jose. In his spare time, he tinkered with an early home computer, trying to work out a way Evans could communicate with the use of a single push-button switch she could operate with the bit of strength left in her fingers.

Woltosz and his wife, Ginger, devised a series of number codes corresponding to phrases Evans might want to use. For example, 913 was “I’m cold,” 314 was “reading glasses” and 908 meant “I want to sit up.” The idea was that Evans could use the switch to make the digits appear on the computer screen.

The main problem was with the switch. “I went to the hardware store and got a doorbell to use as the push button,” Woltosz said. “But we take for granted how much strength it takes to push it. I needed something for someone who could barely move her finger.”

Evans died before he could perfect the system, but Woltosz pressed on, working with other local disabled people. He eventually developed a switch with an appropriately light touch and, instead of a number-based system, he put common phrases on the computer screen. Users pressed the switch to stop a moving cursor on the phrase they wanted.

Meanwhile, Beukelman and others in the augmentative and alternative communication field were doing research into phrases and words most often used in everyday conversation. “We would put portable tape recorders on natural speakers and record everything they would say in a week,” Beukelman said, noting that the research volunteers had the option of turning off the recorder during especially private conversations.

He and his colleagues found that, among adult subjects, age was a major factor in determining how conversations would go. “For people in their 20s and 30s, nearly 40% of utterances were what we call generic small talk,” Beukelman said. “Phrases like ‘How’s it going?’ ‘How are you doing?’ ‘What’s happening?’ are used to connect with people, but we don’t expect a real answer.”

Software developers used the research to help determine what phrases would be included in their software. In the latest version released by Woltosz’s company, Words Plus, the phrases are divided into categories for faster access. Under “commentary,” for example, are “This is fun” and “This is fantastic.”

Other categories include “responses,” “manners” and even “insults,” from which one can choose “What a slob” or “If brains were gunpowder, you wouldn’t have enough to blow your nose.”

Users can add their own oft-used phrases to the lists. And for conversations that go beyond catch phrases, they can put together sentences, word by word, from a vocabulary of about 5,000 words.

They can also use letters to spell out words not in the database, but that takes more time.

The phrases, words and letters are on pages that flip by quickly on the computer screen. The user touches the switch to stop on the appropriate page, then again to choose a line of items, and then once more to pick a specific item. A whole speech can be written, stored and then, with one touch, delivered.

A highly skilled user like Hawking can use the software to speak about 20 words per minute in conversations, compared with 150 to 200 for natural speakers.

Woltosz moved his company to Palmdale in 1991 so he could be closer to his children from an earlier marriage, and to take advantage of the area’s lower housing and office-space costs.

With the help of a National Science Foundation grant last year, Woltosz began to develop computerized science learning programs specifically for the disabled. He hopes to make similar programs--such as those showing chemical experiments--available to able-bodied students.