It would’ve saved him a lot of time rather than reciting the whole alphabet each time. I didn’t like the movie anyway, but that part bothered me.
Blink, blink & hold, blink = R. etc
You could ask Blinkie in his ‘Ask the Guy with Locked-In Syndrome’ thread here.
That’s how they did it in real life. The movie is based on an incredibly beautiful autobiography (I haven’t seen the movie, but highly recommend the book), and that’s how he communicated with everybody around him. I don’t know why they opted for that rather than Morse code, but one possibility is that this way, his family and friends didn’t need to learn Morse in order to communicate with him.
Did he know Morse Code in the first place? I doubt it’d be easy for him to learn it.
Why? I can’t think it’d be any harder to learn than for anyone else - and he has a WHOLE lot more spare time.
I assume in Morse code you don’t always spell out each word but use abbreviations. IIRC in braille the letter “T” means “the” and things like that just to speed the process along. I assume that’s what you’re getting at, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t have just put up a chart for what each letter is and let him spell everything out, is there? It might not be the correct way to do it, but it would beat the hell out of waiting a for the nurse to get to z when you wanted that letter.
I’d think it would be unusual for family and friends to know morse code and confusing and difficult for him to learn in his condition. There are communication boards that split the alphabet up, but they’re only useful if vision isn’t compromised, which, from what I understand, it often is.
I have a family member struggling with this and what I’m hoping for is for him to eventually be able to use a blink, tongue or chin controlled mouse input to a computer.