the first word anticipation computer program, to help him with his studies. He married Penny Morgan and the couple were living in Cirencester when he died.One of Richard's poems:
Thinking of You in Switzerland . . .
from Gloucestershire Echo: 'Our Son Had a Wonderful Life'
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5 comments :
who wrote this and did they know richard?
(I need more than the 4,096 characters permitted so this is Part 1. Part 2 will be the next comment)
I had the great honour of working with Richard when I was a support worker at Wheatridge Court in Gloucester. Wheatridge Court is an interim residential centre for people with physical disabilities and focuses on providing a supported transition from living with parents or carers to living as independently as possible in the community. Richard required minimal basic support while awaiting his permanent home to be built and adapted to his needs.
His head was the only part of his body over which he had any control as he had cerebral palsy. He could speak but only his mother (as far as I know) coud understand the various sounds he could utter. It was his mother, I understand, who fashioned his first 'headstick' from a wire coat hanger and, with the aid of an alphabet board, taught him to read and communicate with the world outside of the hitherto isolated inner world in which he was trapped. Until then, his intelligence and ability to communicate meaningfully with his mother had been dismissed by doctors as "a mother's optimistic delusion".
This had been when he was a child. I don't know how old he was at the time but he had missed the early years of education available to other children at the time. Despite his disability and late start in education, he excelled and went on to university to gain his degree and later his PhD (his correct title is Dr. Richard Gomm).
As well as poetry, he wrote numerous articles, both academic and on the subject of disability. He also devised a support programme to help parents and carers of severely disabled people to pull back and let go as their sons and daughters gained independence, having recognised the difficulties his own parents experienced during this transition.
Typing was a laborious task for him as it had to be executed with a wire stick protruding from a headband. He could type rapidly and the sight of Richard clacking at his keyboard or his alphabet board reminded me of a highly energised sparrow pecking at seeds. To save time and energy, he devised the first 'predictive text' programme which, at the time, I think only he would have been capable of using. I would watch his monitor as he typed... as soon as he typed the first letter of a word, the screen would fill with every word that began with that letter and each consecutive letter he added narrowed the field of options until he either had a few remaining on the screen that he could select to finish the word or, with short words, he finished typing it in whole. I was very impressed but I did remark once that it wasn't much help when typing short words. "I tend not to use many of those" he wrote with a grin.
(Part 2 follows in the next comment)
(Part 2 of my comment)
I also recall when he got his first "voice" device. This enabled communication with people too far away to read his monitor or follow him on his alphabet board. He would type out a sentence and hit a button to annunciate what he had written. He was vry excited about it. It was an electronic voice that spoke with an American accent rather like the device made famous by Professor Stephen Hawking. I wasn't on shift when it arrived so my first encounter with it was when I knocked on his door and heard a robotic "Come in" instead of the more familiar "Uh-uh".
"It's here then!" I said as I opened the door.
"Hello Ron" said the machine.
"All this time and I never knew you were American!" I chuckled. "Can I have a go"
"Be my guest" he typed into the machine.
Being the mature, responsible and highly professional support worker I was, I promptly typed "fuck". A notification appeared on his monitor stating 'NO AUDIO RESPONSE TO THIS WORD'
"WHAT??" I spluttered. "You got a brain the size of a planet and this machine won't let you swear??"
Richard grinned, leaned forward and typed "phuque". That worked. The device had been hardwired to reject a list of known expletives "to prevent abuse", effectively censoring the language of the user. However, expletives were the only words that the device was programmed to actually recognise. Otherwise, it was programmed to annunciate whatever was typed into it, even nonsense words (although, miraculously, it could handle some Welsh words).
"It didn't take you long to figure out a workaround" I chuckled.
"It was the first word I typed into it too" he typed with a grin.
It was good to know I shared a similar mind with a man who has a brain the size of a planet.
Richard remains the most inspiring person I have ever encountered in the 70 years of my life so far. I was very lucky to have known him. I know I shall never meet his like again.
If anyone wishes to respond to this comment, I have long since forgotten my password to the email account associated with this comment but I can be contacted at rontocknell@rocketmail.com
Thank you for such caring sharing, Ron
I have since changed that email address too. It's now tocknellron@gmail.com
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