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The Speech Accessibility Project will soon wrap up the phase of the project that has included people with ALS, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome Parkinson’s disease and those who have had a stroke. (The project isn’t ending – it will soon begin recruiting people who stutter and those who are deaf and hard of hearing.)

Through the last three years of recruitment, the project has worked with nearly 15 trusted partners with direct connections to potential participants. They connected 4,500 potential participants with the study and enrolled nearly 2,000.

“When we started this project, we thought we’d directly recruit people with different voices. We quickly realized that wouldn’t work,” said project leader Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Potential participants didn’t know about or trust the project. Some associated research projects with bad experiences. And because the project’s five etiologies were so different, the project team realized it couldn’t use a blanket approach.

Instead, it began partnering with organizations already serving those the project wanted to recruit. Throughout the project, these organizations served as liaisons within various communities. They shared recruitment information with potential participants and feedback with the project team.

The research team asked partner organizations for help in designing an easy and pleasant recording protocol. It adjusted the type of speech prompts and the appearance and function of the project’s recording software for different etiologies.

In many cases, employees of partner organizations served as mentors to help participants get started, assist if they got stuck and even reminded them to keep recording if they were able.

“These organizations have been partners in the Speech Accessibility Project in every sense of the word. They offered the human touch we needed to help participants feel comfortable,” Hasegawa-Johnson said. “They gave us the credibility we needed to complete this phase of the project, and we are so grateful to have worked with them.”

The Speech Accessibility Project extends its thanks to these partners:

ALS