no abstract provided by author / Master of Science in Education

Blissymbolics is a semantically-based graphic language which was originally developed as universal channel of communication to promote world peace. Instead, this logical and unambiguous symbol system has been adopted as a communication-enhancement system for pre-reading non-speaking children, and it is now ranked as the most comprehensive and effective graphic system used within augmentative communication. Over the years, a number of multi-functional programmes designed to manipulate microcomputer- based assembly of Blissymbols have been developed. Although some of these applications have become rather popular, none of them is based on a mechanism which provides their users with a cognitive access to the stored symbol vocabulary. The present research was initiated and devised with an underlying goal to gain an insight into some of the most potent characteristics of Blissymbolics, and then, with the backing of the findings, offer a microcomputer-based interface featuring a cognitive technique designed to facilitate retrieval, manipulation, teaching and learning of Blissymbols.

Media is considered as one of the most powerful tools in disseminating information thereby shaping people’s lives. While there have been various studies about the relationship between media and people with disabilities, much of the emphasis has been on the media’s representation of people with disabilities than accessibility of print content in formats friendly to people with visual impairments. This research is a qualitative study which looked at the accessibility of online published print media information to people with visual impairments in terms of format. This was done by analysing content in online newspapers and magazines to determine its accessibility to them. Online interviews were also conducted to find out how print media is accessible to people with visual impairments. The Uses and Gratifications and the Social Responsibility theories were selected to frame the study on how media satisfies their specific needs and desires as well as having certain social obligations to society respectively. The findings of this study were that print media was inaccessible to people with visual impairments both in terms of formats and content. There is no print media known to people with visual impairments producing information in Braille format. The electronic version of printed media proved to be inaccessible due to the lack of media adherence to the Web Accessibility Guidelines. The research also established the underrepresentation and lack of representation in some print media due to print media’s lack of interest to cover disability issues. To respond to these needs, a framework was developed to ensure that people who are visually impaired are able to access print media information. / Communication Science / D. Phil. (Communication studies)

The researcher was invited by the CSIR (formerly known as the Council for Industrial and Scientific Research in South Africa) to investigate the work opportunities for persons with disabilities (PWD) in a rural area in the Eastern Cape in which they were planning to implement their Integrated Rural Development Project (IRDP). The community development committee had requested assistance with the plight of the unemployed PWD in their community. The aim of the study was to investigate work opportunities for PWD in rural developing communities. The study allowed the researcher to also explore possible means to maximise current services to reach into areas that are underserved in terms of professional rehabilitation services. A participatory research approach was used for the study in which the research team consisted of the author, members from the community development committee including the sister in charge of the community clinic and three research assistants from the community. In a two-phase disability survey in the 475 household of the area, adults with disabilities in the working age group were identified and their abilities assessed. Five development projects from nearby communities, similar to projects planned by the community were analysed. A scale had been developed that would allow a direct comparison between the abilities of the PWD and the work abilities required for the projects. The data were plotted on a spiral graphic, the Work Abilities Web (WAW), to illustrate compatibility and components for which adaptations might be needed. Taking the PWDs' level of motivation and aspirations into account job matches were made. The intellectual process of making such matches was investigated and described. Because of a lower disability prevalence found in the area than expected from international projections the data were presented as 12 case studies. In the feedback to the community three scenarios were provided for the employment of PWD in their midst for implementation by the community. A committee of PWD was established, which would have representation on the development committee to drive the process and to ensure that disability issues would be considered in all future community planning. The study contributes the following innovations to the knowledge base of health and social sciences theory, in terms of disability and development issues: <ul> <li>A refinement of a participatory research model, the Mutual Benefit Research model (MBR), for research projects with communities. </li> <li>A functional assessment format, developed for possible use by community health workers. </li> <li>The recording and comparison method used for the WAW.</li> <li>An analysis of the job match process used by occupational therapists in vocational rehabilitation. <br></li> </ul> In conclusion the study and the results were critically evaluated and recommendations made for the integration of PWD into the workplace in rural communities, as well as for further investigation into the methods proposed for vocational rehabilitation in underserved areas. / Thesis (PhD (Occupational Therapy))--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Occupational Therapy / unrestricted

This study was the investigation of the effects of five factors related to hiring handicapped individuals. The five factors were psychological disability, physical disability, no disability, and a good or poor work record. The purpose of the study was to determine whether a relationship existed between perceived employment decisions and (a) applicant disability; (b) applicant work record; and (c) personnel managers' demographic characteristics. The population from which the sample was drawn consisted of personnel managers in personnel associations and educational administrators in the piedmont and eastern sections of North Carolina in June and July of 1983. The sample for the study consisted of 133 persons, stratified by size of company or institution. The personnel managers were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions in a 2 x 3 (levels of disability x levels of work record) factorial design. Each subject reviewed staged information on the job applicant prior to listening to a taped job interview of the applicant. After hearing the interview, managers rated the quality of the interview, using the Job Interview Rating Scale and stated the probability that they would hire the applicant on the Probability Of Hire Score. Factors affecting personnel managers' decisions to hire the handicapped were identified through a personnel managers' questionnaire. Higher ratings of the job interview and higher probability of hiring occurred when a positive work record was present. Applicants were less likely to be hired if they had a psychological disability. Ratings of job interviews were not affected by disability levels. There were no interactions between work records and disability status. "Ability to perform job" and "productivity" were ranked by the managers as the most influential among the 26 factors considered by personnel managers when making decisions to hire the handicapped. None of the demographic variables of personnel managers of age, sex, education and experience were significant in their relationship to hiring. Sex of the interviewer appeared to be the best predictor of interview rating. / Ed. D. / Vita. / Abstract. / Bibliography: leaves 94-106. / This dissertation may contain sensitive information and is therefore not available online.

PhD (Sociology) / Department of Sociology / Introduction: Physical disability encompasses a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon within the context of a person’s life childhood and adulthood. Disability covers a wide and diverse range of disabling conditions. Aim of the study: The aim of the study was to explore and describe the experiences of physicaldisability acquired in adulthood. Methodology: The study adopted qualitative research approach, exploratory and descriptive design. Snowball sampling method was adopted to select seven participants who were interviewed by means of semi-structured face-to-face interviews. In order to analyse data, Tesch eight steps of analyzing qualitative data was employed. Results: It was found that experiences of physical disabled adults replete with daily difficulties marked by isolation, loneliness, social disapproval and rejection. Being physical disabled was accompanied with difficulties marked with, feeling of sadness and dejection which was their daily companions. However, the participants found strength and solace from support groups and religious structures which strengthen individuals who acquired physical disability at adulthood. Conclusion: Physical disability acquired in adulthood is accompanied with changes that bring about different difficulties in personal and social life. As a result adults with that experience are left with no choice but adopting coping strategies that assist them to continue with life positively. Recommendation: The study recommends conducting seminars/awareness where civil society and other community based stakeholders and government departments are orientated on the rights of persons with disabilities. Through dissemination of the findings of this study, the researcher hopes that strong message can be conveyed to all stakeholders in disability to ensure mainstreaming of disability in all spheres of life.

It was suggested several decades ago that computers would be the single biggest step forward in integrating people with physical disabilities into "normal" society. At that stage, much work was done in writing software and designing hardware that allowed computer operators with disabilities to use packages effectively, in certain cases as efficiently as people without disabilities. Since those days, judging by the lack of references on this subject the interest in dealing with disabled people has waned. It is only very recently that the spotlight has been focused on these potentially very productive persons. Unfortunately, the backlog is large and most existing applications software offers little or no support for users with disabilities. In this thesis, I have examined some of the hardware and software limitations of current desktop computer technology, focusing on the IBM PC and compatibles. I have also written a computer program that attempts to relieve some of the difficulties faced by a limited number of disabled users. In evaluating the results, I considered it important to relate the ensuing data with the real problems faced by a far wider spectrum of users than I attempted to cater for with the program and to suggest ways in which software products could be made to have wider applicability in the future.

This thesis is about pastoral work with people who live with mobility impairment. The research address two main questions, namely "What are the implications of acquired mobility impairment for personal identity and collective identity?" and "How can we in Christian faith communities, through pastoral work, facilitate a sense of belonging and strengthen personal identity and collective identity for people who are mobility disadvantaged?" This thesis therefore addresses the problem of identity. Thus, a theoretical analysis from literature sources is undertaken to explore theories about narrative identity in relation to personal identity and the importance of the metaphor "belonging" to bridge the gap of personal identity to collective identity. Consequently, religious identity is discussed in relation to the notion of multiple identities and the importance of collective identity to shaping personal identity. The research questions are answered through a theoretical exploration of approaches to disability and qualitative, narrative empirical research is undertaken. A few people who are quadriplegic, a family member and an occupational therapist are interviewed and the recounting of their "stories" facilitated. The empirical research results in highlighting that the research participants' "stories" discloses a link between bodily restrictions and social restrictions to mobility. This combination works together to make social interaction very difficult and clearly influenced the transition from pre-quadriplegia to post-quadriplegia. Analysing the "stories" told by the research participants allows for critical reflection on a preferred pastoral work praxis to people living with mobility impairment. Narrative identity is linked with a theology of embrace and metaphors of "covenant" and "belonging" which expresses that faith communities should imitate the embracing love and compassion of the Triune God who through the act of suffering included all humankind. It provides the foundation for a preferred pastoral work praxis of "embrace" which can be practised holistically and actively through integration with the other practices of faith communities to facilitate a sense of belonging to a collective identity. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / D. Th. (Practical Theology)

Adjustment to disability is a foundational concept within rehabilitation psychology and constitutes an important public health problem given the adverse outcomes associated with maladjustment. While the disability literature has highlighted depressive elevations in response to functional impairment, resilience and alternative patterns of psychological adjustment have received substantially less empirical inquiry. This dissertation is comprised of three papers, the first two of which are longitudinal studies utilizing distinct samples of individuals with acquired disabilities: a population-sample of physically impaired older adults, and a convenience sample of individuals with newly acquired amputations. The third paper summarizes current data science and statistical findings regarding disability adjustment for patients and their providers. The two longitudinal studies share a common statistical methodology, latent growth mixture modeling (LGMM), allowing for the identification of distinct subgroups (classes) of individuals who share similar symptom profiles over time. LGMM is well-poised to resolve fundamental questions about whether psychological functioning after disability is best described by a population-level archetypal response (i.e., distress and depression that remits over time), or alternatively, whether the data suggest a variety of definable subgroups with distinct psychological trajectories. Results of empirical papers 1 and 2 provide strong empirical evidence that the process of disability adjustment is heterogeneous, with multiple pathways of symptom development and remission. The third paper demonstrates how findings from current rehabilitation science can be utilized to inform psychoeducational materials for practitioners and their patients with recent limb loss. This chapter addresses gaps in dissemination of knowledge by describing various patterns of psychological outcomes encountered by individuals following amputation surgery, as supported by Study 2 and the broader resilience literature.

In the hearing-loss community, sign language is a primary tool to communicate with people while there is a communication gap between hearing-loss people with normal hearing people. Sign language is different from spoken language. It has its own vocabulary and grammar. Recent works concentrate on the sign language video caption which consists of sign language recognition and sign language translation. Continuous sign language recognition, which can bridge the communication gap, is a challenging task because of the weakly supervised ordered annotations where no frame-level label is provided. To overcome this problem, connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is the most widely used method. However, CTC learning could perform badly if the extracted features are not good. For better feature extraction, this thesis presents the novel self-attention-based fully-inception (SAFI) networks for vision-based end-to-end continuous sign language recognition. Considering the length of sign words differs from each other, we introduce the fully inception network with different receptive fields to extract dynamic clip-level features. To further boost the performance, the fully inception network with an auxiliary classifier is trained with aggregation cross entropy (ACE) loss. Then the encoder of self-attention networks as the global sequential feature extractor is used to model the clip-level features with CTC. The proposed model is optimized by jointly training with ACE on clip-level feature learning and CTC on global sequential feature learning in an end-to-end fashion. The best method in the baselines achieves 35.6% WER on the validation set and 34.5% WER on the test set. It employs a better decoding algorithm for generating pseudo labels to do the EM-like optimization to fine-tune the CNN module. In contrast, our approach focuses on the better feature extraction for end-to-end learning. To alleviate the overfitting on the limited dataset, we employ temporal elastic deformation to triple the real-world dataset RWTH- PHOENIX-Weather 2014. Experimental results on the real-world dataset RWTH- PHOENIX-Weather 2014 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which achieves 31.7% WER on the validation set and 31.2% WER on the test set. Even though sign language recognition can, to some extent, help bridge the communication gap, it is still organized in sign language grammar which is different from spoken language. Unlike sign language recognition that recognizes sign gestures, sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language to a target spoken language text which normal hearing people commonly use in their daily life. To achieve this goal, this thesis provides an effective sign language translation approach which gains state-of-the-art performance on the largest real-life German sign language translation database, RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T. Besides, a direct end-to-end sign language translation approach gives out promising results (an impressive gain from 9.94 to 13.75 BLEU and 9.58 to 14.07 BLEU on the validation set and test set) without intermediate recognition annotations. The comparative and promising experimental results show the feasibility of the direct end-to-end SLT