Blissboard
A blissboard is a means of communication using Blissymbolics, a language based on symbols that was invented by Charles Bliss in the mid-twentieth century. Blissymbolics has become a language used by people who cannot speak, including the severely handicapped, though Bliss had different intentions when he devised it. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1897, Bliss wanted to create an international system of symbols that could be understood by everyone. After being imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, Bliss eventually came to live in Australia where he developed his language. He based it on symbols and pictographs, and published his work under the title Semantography in 1949. Bliss's language went largely unnoticed, though he continued to revise and refine it. He published another edition of this book in 1965, but added his new name for his language, Blissymbolics, to avoid confusion with the academic discussion of other semantographies. Eventually, Bliss found support in Canada where in 1982, three years before his death, he granted the exclusive rights to Blissymbolics to Blissymbolics Communication International (BCI) in Canada for the use of handicapped people as well as others with language, communication, and learning problems.
While Blissymbolics can be a simple form of communication, with symbols representing common things and ideas, the language is flexible enough that complicated ideas and complex emotions can be expressed as well. There is grammar and tense forms in Blissymbolics, and room for innovation of new symbols by combining other Blissymbols. The symbols can be arranged into sentences with an intricate structure.
But Blissymbolics is easy to learn, for there are a core of about 100 symbols which are the basis to the language, and can be combined in different ways to communicated different ideas. Because of the nature of Blissymbolics, it is widely used by non-speaking people as well as those of limited literacy. Physicist Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous users of Blissymbolics.
One way handicapped people use Blissymbolics is with a blissboard, which features the key symbols on it. A "speaker" points to the symbols to communicate with his or her listener. Blissboards can be mounted on wheelchairs, but can only be used to communicate by two people in the same room. A Canadian woman, Rachel Zimmerman, invented the first computer program to use Blissymbols when she was 12 years old. Her program, called Blissymbol Printer, allows the user to communicate by tapping a touch-sensitive blissboard which is translated into a written language by a computer, then sent or stored. As technology has developed, similar blissboards can be input devices with the output being synthetic speech instead of text. Another software package, Bliss Write, is a Blissymbolics word processor. With the advent of the Internet, another Blissymbolics computer program has been developed, BlissNet. BlissNet translates messages between Blissymbolics and text so users can send and receive e-mail and participate in other on-line forms of communication. Though there are no exact numbers of people who use Blissymbolics, it is safe to assume that the language will continue to become more widespread.
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