When an elderly family friend of Hungarian teenager Balazs Zsombori lost her voice to cancer two years ago, he was determined to do something and started working on a computer application to give her back her speech.

“She was a very nice teacher and, overnight, she could not communicate. I believe that true accessibility can happen when one can access one’s language. So I decided to create the first Hungarian app that will help speech-impaired people communicate,” the 19-year-old said.

PictoVerb creator Balazs Zsombori.

Mr Zsombori, a student at the Technological University of Budapest, created PictoVerb, which was yesterday launched in English and Maltese during a conference on assistive technology for independent living at the University of Malta’s ICT department.

The Parliamentary Secretariat for Disability, Justyne Caruana, said the government supported his work by helping spread the word. Links to the app are on government websites disability.gov.mt and activeageing.gov.mt.

The application, for tablets and smartphones, transforms universal symbols into sentences that can help users express their feelings and needs. Users can customise it by adding images and recording matching sentences using the voice of a loved one.

Mr Zsombori developed the idea with the help of speech-impaired people, starting from his grandmother’s friend who lost her voice to cancer. He communicated with her through e-mail and with the help of her relatives who could read her lips.

He started to realise that she wanted something simple that could voice her needs in Hungarian, something that could be personalised. In 2013, he entered a contest for young innovators and won.

He pressed this – the heart. A symbol of emotions. Then he pressed this button... ‘I feel sad’.

As the media spread the word about his work he started receiving e-mails from other people and used their feedback to improve the app. When the time was right, he went to his grandmother’s friend with his creation.

“She was really happy. That’s when I understood I should really focus and put more work into it,” he said.

Later that year, he entered the EU’s European Young Scientist of the Year competition where he met Maria Cordina, a professor at the University of Malta’s Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, who was a jury member. Sometime later he contacted her and, together, they translated his app into Maltese.

The basic version is free but people who download the full version pay a nominal fee of €20 to cover costs that include commission to Google, tax and maintenance costs. He recommends that people first try the free version to see if it meets their needs.

Since launching PictoVerb, he added, he had many rewarding experiences. On one occasion, a teacher at a special education school told him how, after downloading the free version, she took her tablet to her class of 10 second-graders.

“She placed it on her desk and let the children explore. The first one to do so was a deaf student who is also non-verbal. He pressed this – the heart. A symbol of emotions. Then he pressed this button,” he said. As he mimicked the child’s action the tablet said: ‘I feel sad’.

“The teacher knew that this boy was sad because he missed his grandmother a lot... What she didn’t expect was that the other children stood around the boy and, one by one, they pressed this button,” he said as the tablet repeated: “I love you, I love you.”

“This always gives me a lot of energy. This really pays me... I’m very happy now to be playing a part in Malta to help people,” he said.

http://pictoverb.com/en

Social stigma

Social stigma is still hindering people with hearing problems from using hearing aids, according to audiologist Andrew Sciberras.

“Many people who are ageing are not doing what they should to be able to hear,” he said during the conference. Forty per cent of hearing loss happened after the age of 65. However, he believed the age could drop in future “because we live in a noisy world”.

He said more needed to be done to raise awareness about taking care of our sense of hearing and to combat the social stigma that was still very strong in Malta.

People were waiting too long before doing something about their hearing problems. Some were also discouraged from going for hearing aids – or other assistive technologies like cochlear implants – because of the expense and the hassle of learning to live with them.

“There is lack of information,” he said, adding that assistive technology could help improve quality of life.