Welcome to the TalkBox Project page.
TalkBox a project that has been undertaken by faculty and students from the GaMaY Lab, in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University, in collaboration with Ray Feraday, who is a Special Education teacher with the Toronto Catholic District School Board, a maker, and an innovator of technology use in the classroom.
This project has several goals:
- Empowerment: to provide a low-cost open-source, open-hardware Speech Generating Device (aka “SGD”) and other assistive technologies to the community, so that those who need such devices can more easily obtain them. To empower more individuals who have disabilities be makers themselves. To create an ecosystem of making that provides employment opportunities for high school students who have developmental disabilities.
- Community: to build a community of knowledge and practice around maker approaches to assistive technologies. This includes create rich experiential learning experiences for undergraduate students in the Lassonde School of Engineering and other undergraduate programs. Read about the story of one of our students in the Toronto Star.
- Innovation: to make use of new modes of academic-community collaboration. To provide a maker-based mode in the ecology of technology distribution for SGDs and other assistive technologies (which includes the mode provided by Ontario’s Assistive Devices Program). To enrich the body of scholarship that is concerned with the field of Assistive Technology. To mobilize knowledge outputs from academic research into active use in the community.
We are also collaborating with Madelene Levy, a special education teacher with the York Region District School Board, operating an adult literacy program at Participation House.
We are also collaborating with the Tetra Association of North America, which is a not-for-profit that recruits skilled volunteers to create customized assistive devices for people with physical disabilities.
