ZYGO's 30th Anniversary - For the last 30 years, ZYGO Industries has been serving the community of people with disabilities with innovative products - and more than anything, with its heart. We have always tried to concentrate on one's abilities and needs in our product designs and services. Portability, durability, functionality and ease of use are just a few named characteristics of our products.

Technology will change and our products will change with time, but one thing will never change - our goal to assist people with disabilities to live life independently.

ZYGO Chatter's 4th Anniversary - In February 2000, we published our first issue. By the end of that year we were emailing this quarterly newsletter to about 100 people. Today, we're happy to announce that we're emailing our newsletter to thousands of subscribers. We hope that you enjoy reading the contents and that you find them informative. Your ideas, questions and feedback make up these contents. Thank you for your help, keep them coming.

Prices Updated - We have posted updated U.S.A. price lists. Price lists on GEWA products, Switches and Infra-Link have been added. Bear in mind that prices are subject to change without notice.

Snow days in Portland, Oregon - We experienced a heavy amount of snow along with freezing rain from January 6th through January 8th. Despite the severe weather conditions, a few of our employees made it to work and kept ZYGO open for a few hours during those days.

We apologize for any inconvenience the short hours may have caused you.

LightWRITERs are text-to-speech devices and so require some degree of literacy. LightWRITERs are used by many people with acquired speech disorders following laryngectomy, tracheostomy, stroke, head injury, or with progressive neurological diseases such as Motor Neuron Disease (also known as Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS), Parkinson's Disease, Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Huntington's Chorea. LightWRITERs are also used by people with congenital speech disorders with conditions such as Cerebral Palsy.

Meet Gavin who is 14 and has Cerebral Palsy
I have Cerebral Palsy and use a powered wheelchair to get around. It also affects my speech. It is specially difficult when I am talking to strangers or people who do not know me very well. I use a LightWRITER. I've had it for five years and it helps me a lot. I can write what I want to say or store sentences in the memory so that I can say things quickly. I use my LightWRITER at school. It is especially useful in drama. I can store my lines in the memory. I also use it socially to talk to my friends.

Meet Richard who is in his early 60s and has MND (Motor Neuron Disease)
I was diagnosed with bulbar MND a year ago, and am determined to get from life all that I can from the input of energy and enthusiasm. I started using a LightWRITER eight months ago as my voice began to deteriorate and it was good to be able to practice with it before I became dependent on it, three months later, when my voice went altogether.

I have been a research scientist with a strong interest in safety and still do some consulting. I use a laptop at home which is good preparation for the LightWRITER. I still attend some meetings and the LightWRITER allows me to make spontaneous interruptions that would otherwise be impossible.

I play bridge and have got all the bids stored as abbreviations in the LightWRITER. My wife and I recently went on a two week cruise to Iceland and Greenland, and the LightWRITER enabled me to play 100 hands during the trip.

We had an amusing time recently when I was trying to navigate for my wife who was driving around in Wales and we found that the English speech synthesizer struggled with some Welsh place names!

My speech is now not good enough for people to understand any of it, even my wife. I am really dependent on my LightWRITER, and would be terribly frustrated without it. It even allows me to make puns in slow motion – it's important in this business to keep one’s sense of fun! I am sure that LightWRITERs have improved the quality of life for those who use them.

The Selection Mode, provides a flexible means of highlighting portions of text for the purposes of speaking, copying or deleting, (when used in conjunction with the arrow keys.) This is specially useful when you want to control the flow of the spoken text, such as speaking sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph, Or, perhaps, to repeat a portion of text that someone did not understand.

Accessing Polyana through the keyboard:
Letters, Words, Sentences, Paragraphs and All can be highlighted with the use of the Ctrl key plus letter (L, W, S, P, A) combination.

Ctrl + S: Highlights sentence (a sentence boundary can be a period, exclamation point, question mark or Enter key)

Ctrl + P: Highlights paragraph as shown(a paragraph boundary is the Enter key)

Enabling Sticky Keys functionality would allow the Shift and Control keys to remain pressed without having to hold them down. To enable/disable StickyKeys, select Preferences from the File menu. Then select General and check/uncheck the StickyKeys option and press the Close button.

Accessing Polyana through scanning:
Open the document you're giving a speech from. Now select the Letter key. Selecting the Letter key causes the Word Prediction column to be replaced by the selection keys of; Letter, Word, Sentence, Paragraph, All and Close. Scan to select the Paragraph key. Select the Sel N key (located above the Undo key) to toggle the key to Sel Y which means that the Left and Right keys will highlight the text. At this point the first paragraph in your document will get highlighted. Selecting the Speak key will speak the highlighted paragraph. To highlight and speak the next paragraph, you need to scan select the Right key and then the Speak key. The Left key will highlight the previous paragraph.

The QHW does not show the actual time like ordinary clocks. Instead it shows the time remaining until an event starts, with each quarter of an hour represented by a circle.
The example above shows that there are two quarters of an hour left until it is time to catch the bus. The users do not need to understand this time ratio exactly. They may learn that 8 black circles is a long time, and 2 circles is not too long to wait. One circle....better get ready!

Every point on the screen of the QHW corresponds to a quarter of an hour. If the remaining time until an event starts is two hours or more, all the circles are filled in. When the time arrives, the QHW beeps. When the time has passed the circles scroll on the screen.

To see how much time is left until an event starts, a picture card is placed in the QHW. On the front of the card is a picture that symbolizes the event. The start time is programmed on the rear of the card.
Programming the start time is simple. It is punched out on a disposable clock face made of plastic, which is clipped on the rear of the picture card.

Meet Karin (thanks to Handitek) [note: terminology used in Sweden has not been changed to preserve the originality of the story.]

Karin is a woman in her early forties, living in her parental home. She works in a day centre as well as at an ordinary job, and uses the transportation service for disabled people in order to move between her activities. Karin is moderately mentally disabled. Her speech as well as her ability to read, write and count are limited.

In matters relating to time, Karin is extremely dependent on her parents while in her home. She experiences difficulty in determining the amount of time remaining until a certain activity is to take place, but would like to be independent and keep her own times. This has meant that she always prepares herself for her activities too far in advance.

The goal of using the Quarter Hour Watch for Karin was thus to reduce her dependence upon others and to improve her concept of time. Karin's relatives as well as the personnel from the day centre were consulted before Karin began to use the Quarter Hour Watch. It was agreed that pictures representing various activities at the day centre would initially be used in order for the personnel there to supervise the practical implementation. Karin herself chose pictograms as the symbols on the picture cards.

The first picture cards introduced were those representing the morning and the afternoon coffee breaks. These were marked in different colours for purposes of distinction. Karin rapidly learned to use these and continued with picture cards representing trips to and from the day centre as well as a card representing her weekly visit to the speech therapist, which Karin uses Thursdays after lunch. This card is marked with a pictogram representing the visit to the speech therapist, and colour coding is used to indicate the day of the week. During her first few weeks Karin was successively introduced to new picture cards, so that at the follow-up after a month she was using seven different picture cards.

For Karin, the Quarter Hour Watch has brought about increased independence in keeping times. It is due to the card representing her visit to the speech therapist that Karin can now calmly eat her lunch on Thursdays, whereas she previously rushed and proceeded to wait for the taxi outside for a long time. Her concept of time has improved and she uses the display indicators to a certain extent in order to evaluate the amount of time remaining before her activities. She has thus become more independent in the planning of her time.

We have discovered that repairs on most LightWRITERs could have been avoided if the keyboard had been cleaned. Dirty keyboards are the number one cause of malfunctioning/non-functioning LightWRITERs. These mishaps range from simple annoyances to not allowing the unit to shut down, which in turn will deplete the battery charge, making the user believe that the unit needs a new battery. The LightWRITER shown to the left is excessively dirty. It will cost the client hundreds of dollars for cleaning before we even attempt to repair. All of this could have been avoided, if a Raincoat had been in use.

If you use a Raincoat or Glove to protect your LightWRITER, make sure that it's free of holes or tears. Holes or tears in these accessories either should be repaired with tape, or get replaced. Raincoats and Gloves are meant to protect your units by keeping moisture out. A tear or hole in them will obviously do the opposite, and accumulation of fluid over time will cause your keyboard not to function.

Procedure for cleaning your LightWRITER keyboard:
Clean the external surfaces with a cloth moistened with an all purpose cleaner product. In United States, we use 409 formula or Simple Green.

If the LightWRITER is fitted with a LightTouch keyboard, the key surround or keyguard may be removed by unscrewing 4 screws, after which the keyguard and the 48 keys can then be lifted off. Soak the keyguard and plastic keys in water and give them a thorough cleaning. Ensure the plastic keys and keyguard are dry before refitting. Moisten the rubber pegs with a damp cloth to prevent the keys from sticking when being refitted. Make certain that all keys are fully seated prior to replacing the surround, this is crucial, as improperly seated keys will cause faulty key presses and confuse the LightWRITER.

Fantastic Special Offers - Limited Quantities Available:
	LightWRITER SL87 — We're offering a limited quantity of our field demo SL87 units with one year warranty for only $4,595.00 (US). The regular list price is $6,625.00 (US). That's over 30% in savings! Medicare Assignment Accepted.			Parakeet 5 with Carry Case and Wordwise Sticker Pack for $175.00 Simple and easy to use — (Regular Price: $425.00)

Pauses within spoken output from speech synthesizers can make the verbalizations more intelligible, and more pleasant to the listeners. Both periods and commas automatically pause the spoken output. The time of the pause can be controlled by inserting a "code" (syntax) in the text. The syntax for the comma pause is [:cp ##], and the syntax for the period pause is [:pp ##], where ## represents the pause time in milliseconds (ms). The syntaxes [:cp 0] and [:pp 0] (those are number zeros) reset the comma and period pauses to their default values. These pauses can be increased to a maximum of 30 seconds (30,000 ms). The process is illustrated by the following example:

"[:cp 600]
I want to order a hamburger with cheese, no onions, lots of ketchup, lots of lettuce, pickles, and no mayonnaise. [:cp 0]"
Hear this example with and without the comma pause command.

The command [:cp 600] adds a pause of 600 ms (0.6 seconds) after every comma, creating a longer pause than usual. The command [:cp 0] will reset the comma pause to the default value of 160 ms. The amount of delay can be varied throughout the speech by inserting different pause times in the text. For example:

"[:pp 1000]
I could give up chocolate but I'm not a quitter. [:pp 1500] Put "eat chocolate" at the top of your list of things to do today, that way at least you'll get one thing done. When life presents you with a rocky road, just eat your way out of it. [:pp 0]"
Hear this example with and without the period pause command.

In the above example, there's a 1000 ms (1 second) pause between the first and second lines, and there's a 1500 ms (1.5 seconds) pause between the second and third lines. The [:pp 0] will reset the period pause time back to its default value of 640 ms.

Have you ever thought about the cost of replacing your unit if it was stolen or damaged? Checking with your home insurance policy to insure your device against damage and theft might be well worth the effort.

The following tours are the best way to learn about new products and emerging technologies. Applications for use of products, as well as strategies and techniques, are presented by factory personnel in a series of 1-day workshops. For updates, please visit CAMA or our calendar page regularly.