My sister has done some volunteer work with an organization which works with children who had previously been unable to communicate, neither verbally nor via writing. Many or most of these children are on the autism spectrum, but it’s my understanding that that there are a multitude of reasons that these children are in this state.

The method they use to help those children learn to communicate is via a letter board. Some of the children can point, but most can only direct their gaze, or in many cases, give some indication when the person assisting them is pointing at the correct letter.

In my sister’s experience with a handful of children–and my understanding is that the organization has had the same experience with all of the hundreds of children they’ve worked with–not one of these children has been unable to communicate once given the tools.

They’ve lived in a world where they can see and hear and comprehend, but where they couldn’t share. And where people around them have no indication of their level of comprehension and often treat them… poorly. Some of these children have terrible stories to tell about the assumptions made about them and the conditions they have had to deal with.

The question I had was, if they could not communicate–and in many cases could not even point–how could they use a letter board to spell out the words? How did they learn to read? My sister’s answer is that all that was required was for their parents to read to them and allow them to see the books while they were being read to. These children learned the basics of spelling from even a modicum of training because the brain of a child–even, and maybe especially one which can not communicate externally–is primed to adsorb knowledge.

I recently got an iPad pro, partially because I wanted a new toy, and partially because of this work my sister has been doing. What interests me about it is that it’s large enough to be a letter board, and that it includes as part of the face recognition engine a gaze recognition API which might be trainable in such a way that these children could learn to communicate with their eyes only. It’s a project I’m just starting on.

I’m publishing it here because I don’t know how much work is involved, and I don’t intend to sell it for profit. If someone beats me to the punch and builds this for a community of children who are prisoners in their own brains, I would be thrilled. Steal my idea. Help thousands of young minds realize their potential.