Abstract: A self-powered, portable, hand-held communicator and system provides a deaf user with a visual display of conversational information transmitted to him with a standard pushbutton telephone. A highly efficient and easily remembered encoding scheme is featured wherein the alphabetic character encoding utilizes the standard markings on the telephone pushbuttons and the relative positional location of the pushbuttons. Rapid tactile transmission of messages by a user is enhanced and user fatigue minimized by requiring only a single pushbutton stroke per hand to transmit any alphabetic character. User fatigue is additionally minimized by distributing pushbutton actuation requirements for normal conversation among a plurality of the fingers of each hand and by assigning control functions to pushbuttons having positions spatially and visually related to the encoding function they perform and to the user's finger positions during message transmission.