A petition to the Prime Minister for funding

Assistive Technology is a life line to some people with disabilities providing access to many things that most people consider a fundamental human right - communication, access to education and control of one's environment to name a few. Stephen Hawking is a clichéd example of an effective Assistive Technology user.

There is no consistent, or coherent provision of Assistive Technology in the UK and a number of services have recently suffered from Government support being withdrawn - e.g. the ACE Centres (supporting children with communication difficulties in education); BECTA's SEN IT Team (supporting access to the curriculum for students with special needs); CAP program (funding communication aids for children) and FAST (developing and innovating in the Assistive Technology field).

We the undersigned request that dedicated funding is provided across sectors to enable Assistive Technology to be provided where needed and support the existing teams

petitions.pm.gov.uk/SupportAT/

Post edited by: Karl, at: 2007/03/05 22:38

On the NHS a person can received hearing aids, glasses, special shoes, wheelchairs/sticks, etc…. So why not provide a speech synthesiser? I think speech synthesisers are essential to a person who requires them. If a person was hard of hearing and also had a very poor speech, he/she would obtain a hearing aide to allow the person to help hear people talk to him/her, but he would find it very hard to reply back without a speech synthesiser!
The speech synthesiser is important and essential to the quality of a person's life, so I think it should be free on the NHS as it's an aid for communicating!

Yea, agreed.

Do you have any statistics for the numbers of potential users for AT?

don't really know but not many users