Total communication is a relatively new philosophy in the education of hearing impaired children. It encompasses the use of all available modes of communication to ensure complete understanding by the deaf or partially hearing child. This paper describes research aimed at applying the philosophy of total communication to the design of teaching workstation for the disabled.

The Total Communication Workstation (TCW) has several potential applications in the education of children with impaired hearing. These include speech therapy, language development, sign language teaching and communication development.

An embryonic system has been developed to demonstrate the theory. The prototype provides a visual information channel for the trainee using a display of animated British Sign Language. A rule based speech synthesizer, or alternatively speech vocoding provides an aural channel, whilst a speaker dependant, template matching voice recogniser enables the TCW to recieve spoken communication from the trainee. The philosophy behind the workstation and the design of the prototype will be discussed in the paper along with proposals for future research.