Visual Disability
Simple factors such as making sure there is good lighting around people trying to communicate with the person who has a visual impairment and using Braille to comminucate all support people with visual disabilities but there are also various technological aids such as glasses, contact lenses, IT software, magnifying equipment. Glasses cam be used for aesthetic reasons but are generally worn to improve vision. They consist of a simple frame that fits over the nose, across the eyes and behind the ears, in front of both eyes there is a lens. It is the lenses that correct vision, they work by changing the direction of the light that comes into the eyes, and depending on the severity of the visual disability the lens will have a certain index of refraction and a certain amount of space between the two surfaces of the lens. Contact lenses work in the same way as glasses except instead of being set in framework that are based in front of the face they are placed in the eyes separated from the cornea by floating on tears. Programmes that can be installed on computers to support people with visual disabilities are: Supernova (used to enlarge screen and has a speech output), ZoomText (changes font size, colours, cursor size and smoothes text).
Learning Difficulty
A way in which to make communication easier for people with learning difficulties is to set up an understanding of the use of signs and symbols, use Makaton, have an advocate if the difficulty is severe enough and so that is easy to communicate to people that you have a learning difficulty produce a communication passport which will allow people the knowledge of the best and worst ways to communicate with someone in a format that everyone understands.
Physical disability
Depending on the type and area of disability different support can be given. If it is a speech problem someone can be referred to a speech therapist who will decide the correct treatment for the problem or if it is to do with the throat and someone is unable to produce speech a piece of equipment will be fitted to identify what the vibrations that the voice box is giving and transfer it to speech. A common technological aid that is used for people with movement disabilities is wheelchairs. These can be electrical or simply self operated by moving the wheels.
Spoken language differences
Supports that can be provided for this barrier of communication is translators, interpreters, visual communication such as attempting to act out the communication with maybe hand or arm gestures and using signs and symbols maybe found around the environment or drawn up by yourself. A technological aid that can help overcome this barrier in certain situations is computer based translators. This would be useful for maybe understanding an email that is in a language you can’t understand, all you s imply have to do is input the text into the translator, select which language you would like the text converted to and press go. However there are problems with using this system. Each language has its own way of structuring sentences, so when a piece of text is converted the computer system will generally translate it word for word, this meaning some of the words will appear to be in the wrong order in a sentence, maybe making communication still not understandable.
