> I've just watched _The Diving Bell and the Butterfly_ (excellent
> movie), and following some links, found a French locked-in syndrome
> association.
>
> They have some information about "communication without language"
> (only in French, though you can try your luck with an online
> translator):
>
http://alis-asso.fr/e_upload/pdf/communiquer_2008.pdf
>
http://alis-asso.fr/ewb_pages/c/communiquer_sans_parole.php
>
> This reminds me of something I wanted to do last year, as I have a
> similar problem, albeit rarely.
>
> There are times when I have been unable to speak or control my body in
> anything more than very crude ways. A couple times, during atonic
> seizures, I essentially had the exact same condition as the person in
> the film - I could blink, and later grunt, but no more.
>
> More frequently, I find myself merely unable to speak; that's not too
> bad though, since I'm moderately fluent in American Sign Language, and
> I've always ensured my partners learned some.
>
> It seems to me that the methods described in the flyer (and portrayed
> in the film) are both extremely cumbersome and don't adequately take
> advantage of all the articulators that a person with LIS (or seizure)
> may have. (E.g.: one can blink in patterns, have length be
> significant, grunt softly, grunt loudly, etc. A good system would need
> to abstract this somehow and accommodate some range of articulation
> channels.)
>
> Thus, this seems to be a good candidate for medically beneficial
> conlanging.
>
> Have any of you experienced this? Do you know of resources that give
> the current state of the art for communication in similar situations?
>
> Would you be interested in collaborating on creating a better system?
>
> - Sai
>