to things that they were not able to participate in before," she said.
McMillian and Titus felt that the computer would also help them measure the true capability of their students. Conventional intelligence tests, they said, do not gauge the intelligence of their students accurately because of their handicaps.
The technology also can be used to improve communications skills. One program, called "Chatterbox," drills a deaf student on how to say words correctly. The computer becomes a surrogate therapist, monitoring the speech of the student and reproducing the sounds on the screen and from a voice synthesizer.
More Difficult Lesson
The student repeats words such as "cat," "dig" and "fox" until he says them correctly with consistency. The computer then moves to a more difficult lesson.