Penn State Learning Factory team members: Tony Liu, John McCreery, Finn McSorley, Cheng-Yun Ni, Sasha Pershina (Penn State University)
RERC on AAC team members: Erik Jakobs and David McNaughton
Overview: Currently available AAC technology has, in many ways, moved what was used in paper displays for over 50 years onto a tablet screen. This has brought some advantages to the user (e.g., light weight access to a wide variety of AAC vocabulary). Tablet technology, however, is capable of supporting innovative design features such as motion, and highlighting, that were not available in traditional paper displays. As part of the work of the RERC on AAC, RERC on AAC team members are investigating the impact of these features in usability trials. To conduct these usability trials, they need AAC software that can be easily configured to provide features that are not available in current AAC software. The aim of this specific project was to continue the development of a software application (first begun in a prior semester by an earlier student team) to create an easily customizable grid. This will support the investigation of new approaches to AAC software.
The software created will allow the research team to easily set background colors, spacing, incorporate motion, support literacy acquisition with the transition-to-literacy feature, etc. This grid prototype is designed for usability testing (specifically the impact of motion on symbol learning), and is not meant to, in its current form, be an AAC system that would be used by an individual with complex communication needs. Our goal is that our work will support the investigation of design features that, if they are demonstrated to be of benefit, would then be incorporated into commercially available AAC apps.
Goals for the current team
• modifications necessary to enable the app developed by the previous student team to run in iOS (in addition to Android as it does now),
• modify UI to work on iOS and Android phone and tablet devices,
• add smooth animations of the text of a key, or image of a key, to “grow out of the key” to full screen while speech output is occurring.
Approach
– Xamarin C# coding via Microsoft Visual Studios
Outcomes
– Customizable assistive communication grid prototype for research purposes
– Features: help button that guides the user, keys can be created and edited, text to speech, storage of keys after application is closed, ability to edit overall grid layout
