Focus - agosci

While this is a limited and narrow data set under specific
conditions, it captured the students’ enthusiasm for
communicating with the iPad activity display. There may
have been a novelty effect as these students have not had
regular, ongoing access to speech generating technology.
After the initial experiences with single page activity
displays, we decided to try programming a full page set
of core and fringe vocabulary with pragmatic organisation,
linked pages, category index i.e. using as many features
of the direct access PODDs the students were using every
day as was appropriate on the ipad platform. So began a
60 hour process of building the pages and importing some
PCS that were not included in the Tap Speak Choice PCS
library. We created a 12 symbol per page book as a proforma
that we would be able to trial with the largest proportion
of our light tech PODD users. The process highlighted
more limitations
of the app. We
could not save
a folder within a
folder so could
effectively
only have
one ‘project’
saved on each
device. For
three months after
constructing the
full page sets
we could not
export it off the
original device to
share with other
users. After the
third upgrade of
Tap Speak Choice in October 2011 and by downloading
iexplorer we were finally able to export our page set onto
other mobile devices. Now we are in a position to share
our proforma page set with a range of AAC users and can
finally explore the opportunities and limitations of speech
generating AAC on a mobile platform in everyday contexts.
Some other observations and differences when
programming page sets on Tap Speak Choice versus more
traditional AAC software became apparent. For each page
you create, Tap Speak Choice requires the programmer to
select a working set of symbols you will need on your page
and add these to the ‘Picker’ function. From the picker, you
then drag the symbols onto the page in linear order. This
added an extra step and it would seem more efficient to
select symbols directly from the full library.
Although it is frustrating trying to replicate the speech
generating features using an app that is not as
comprehensive or sophisticated in terms of its programming
capacity as traditional AAC software, the developer of Tap
Speak Choice has been willing to correspond via Skype from
the US to help advance
some solutions. Some
technical issues like
free page configuration
rather than pre-set
templates and saving
pages within nested
folders he has been able
to work on immediately.
Other things he takes
on notice to investigate
such as Australian
accents, pronunciation
exceptions, pop-up
pages and text to
speech. Other things
on our wish-list like
word morphology
are probably further
away. Ted Conley is a
computer programmer
who has essentially designed and built Tap Speak Choice
to cater for the needs of his young son who has Autism
Spectrum Disorder and Cortical Vision Impairment. His
son is in the early AAC acquisition and learning period and
therefore Ted’s current priorities are to further develop his app
for users at the earlier language levels. He acknowledges
that ProLoquo2Go targets users with higher language skills,
but the lack of PCS in P2Go remains a barrier for users who
are beyond key word communication but need a high tech
option that is compatible with their low tech PODDs. For our
AAC community who has not had easy access to high tech
AAC devices, the challenges and frustrations of trying to
push emerging technology to do what traditional AAC does
so expertly is worthwhile because this is the only realistic
speech generating technology they can access.
We are at the early stages of implementing comprehensive
page sets as an AAC tool for everyday communication.
Already we have seen some responses from students which
have been significant for them. For some of our students on
the Autism spectrum who had been using paper PODDs
for a number of years – attending to receptive input but
with limited or no expressive use – the iPad platform has
elicited initiation and spontaneous use of words. Perhaps
any touch screen SGD would have had this effect, but the
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