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HumanWare design and manufacture equipment for the blind and
partially-sighted. Over 2007 and 2008, Project Advantage had the
opportunity to work with HumanWare when one of our project managers led
the project team to develop a new product, the Deaf-Blind Communicator,
an innovative device to give people who are both deaf and blind the
ability to “talk” to hearing-sighted people.
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HumanWare had secured a contract to provide this product to the
Office of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Washing ton State USA. Once
established in the market the product would then be pushed out to the
rest of USA and worldwide.
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The
communicator has a number of modes to allow the deaf-blind person to
interact with general public in the street, or by SMS texting, and also
allows communication between devices so deaf blind people can talk to
each other without needing to be in physical contact.
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Although based on an existing hardware product,the HumanWare
BrailleNoteTM, the Deaf-Blind Communicator software user interface and
hardware peripherals had to be designed with close attention to the
specific needs of the end users.
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This project was
designed in NZ (with some aspects of software design occurring in
Canada), to be manufactured in California for a client in Washington
State. Stakeholder management and project co-ordination was therefore
challenging.
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The approach we had to take for design
feedback on this project was unusual: for obvious reasons, sketch
drawings, space models and partially functioning feature sets could not
be used to communicate concepts. The product concept and proposed
feature set had to be carefully explained to a deaf-blind focus group,
to ensure that the design team, as sighted-hearing people, didn’t
make incorrect assumptions. Each prototype had to be placed in the hands
of the focus group and product feature training had to be delivered by
physical sign language translators.
The
Deaf-Blind Communicator has been successfully delivered into Washington
state and is being distributed to end users, significantly enhancing the
lives of this sector of the population.
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