The importance of communication

As the mother and principal teacher of my nonspeaking son, I know well the travails such a person meets when negotiating his way through a chattering world. I know also the transformative change brought into his life when he learned to communicate at 18 years of age. He writes about this in his book “Traveler’s Tales” which was shortlisted for a Gratiaen in 2015. He is still non-speaking but certainly not non-communicative. Currently working with many students with no speech or minimal speech we know how widespread this is. Chammi calls it the silent abyss. It is our hope that teaching children to communicate via Assistive and Augmentative Communication (AAC) will change this. Apps like Kathakaramu will go a long way to change the world for many people we hope.

The roots of the Kathakaramu App

In 1970, my husband Sarath was doing his PhD at the University of Minnesota and I was a library assistant at Augsburg College. I was recruited to teach Sinhala to a group of students planning a summer in Sri Lanka. The students were determined to learn to read Sinhala and no matter what I said about the complexity of our alphabet, they remained fixated. So I laid out the Sinhala alphabet and realized that there was a very logical pattern to it. I made a chart and gave the English equivalent for each sound and the students were able to teach themselves the alphabet.