Mrs Kubo is the mother of an autistic child who fortunately was diagnosed when still very young. In order to help him develop word skills when he was still a small baby, Mrs Kubo started cutting out pictures/simple icons from magazines and other sources – pictures that could easily be associated with an object or action and a word. She laminated the pictures and put them in a binder. She could then show him a picture, tell him the word, and encourage him to say the word.

This process has been effective for working with most autistic individuals, but is most effective if started when the person is young. As her son’s word bank began to grow, the binder grew until it reached a weight of 15 pounds.

Mrs Kubo has devoted her life to raising her son and eventually to developing programs to help others. Her son had been born when she and her husband were living in the United States while her husband was stationed here. Her husband is a senior member of a Japanese corporation and must live wherever in the world his company assigns him. As is still typical for large Japanese corporations, managerial personnel are simply assigned wherever the company feels they are needed and the company does not necessarily take any personal situations into account. Mrs Kubo decided to remain in American where she felt better care was available for her son, he would have less problems in interacting with others, and there would be more opportunities for him. Mr Kubo’s company was very supportive in helping to arrange for Mrs Kubo and her two children to remain in the United States.

Wherever she went with her son, she carried the binder with her. In his younger years, she also had to carry around his clothes, food, diapers, and even the boy himself when he would throw a tantrum and refuse to walk. This ended up becoming an average of 70 pounds to carry, and Mrs Kubo herself only weighed 80 pounds at the time. She developed tendonitis, leg problems and finally had to use crutches. Her son is now 16 years of age. He has made remarkable progress with her tutelage, and technology has now made her life easier for her.

A major advance came for Mrs Kubo, and others, when she was able to develop an application for an iPhone that would allow anyone using it to call up any icon/picture at any time wherever they were, and the iPhone would say the appropriate word for the autistic person. The app can be used by the autistic person themselves as well as by someone helping them. As an autistic person begins to use it by themselves, parents or caregivers can sleep longer and easier. One disadvantage of the iPhone was the small size of the picture, so when Apple introduced the iPad Mrs Kubo made an app for that also.

The iPad’s larger screen made another application possible: it could be used to enable some older people with speech problems, and others who had difficulty talking, to more easily communicate by pointing. Despite the widespread sales of Voice4u, Mrs Kubo is still concerned about the number of parents and caregivers that do not know about it. She wonders how knowledge about it could be spread more widely.

Question

1. What other means might be helpful for spreading information about Voice4u?