Exploring Communication Assistants as an Option for Increasing Communication Access to Communities for People who use Augmentative Communication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Barbara Collier*a, Donna Mcghie-Richmondb & Hazel Selfaa aAugmentative Communication Community Partnerships-Canada, Torontob bUniversity of Victoria, Canada*Corresponding author. Augmentative Communication Community Partnerships-Canada, 131 Barber Greene Road, Toronto, ON M3C 3Y5 Canada. Tel: +1 416 444 9532. E-mail: Barbara.collier@sympatico.caThis paper describes the results of a one-year intervention project that aimed to (a) learn about the communication supports required by people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) when accessing their communities, (b) develop and implement a funded communication assistant service as an accessibility support option for people who use AAC when communicating in their communities, (c) evaluate the impact of the communication assistant service on community access for people who use AAC, and (d) make recommendations relating to the role of communication assistants as an option for increasing communication access for people who use AAC in their communities. Nine people who use AAC participated in this project. The findings suggest that the majority of participants experienced a range of communication barriers when communicating with people in their communities, and that the provision of trained communication assistants significantly increased (a) their ability to communicate and participate in their communities; (b) their feelings of dignity, empowerment, autonomy, and privacy, and (d) the quality of their community services. Unfamiliar communication partners reported increased satisfaction communicating with people who used AAC when a communication assistant was present. Implications and recommendations are made for the development of communication assistant services and further research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".