Home  Michael  My Talker  AAC  Projects: Project: Twinspeak

Project: TwinSpeak
Method 1 - Letter & Numbers from Janet Scott's Teddies, slides 17 and 21 Method 2 - Grid, Column, Row Colours

 

Purpose:

To demonstrate Eye-Pointing as a method of communicating. Following one another's gaze is one of the earliest forms of communicating between an infant and its community, and one which continues throughout life. For some, it is the only means of communication and social interaction.

Scenario:

The audience will witness the process of two non-speaking people conversing by means of one of them eye-pointing to icons on a sheet of Perspex placed between them, and the other locating the same icons on the keyboard overlay of his voice output communication aid (VOCA) and pressing them to make it speak.

Either person can direct the conversation, be the teller, the asker, the listener or the responder, but at all times the gazer will gaze and the VOCA user will generate the speech output for both sides of the conversation.

 

Method:

The same 1,000s of words that are stored on the communication aid used for this project (Pathfinder running Minspeak LLL) can be accessed equally efficiently, but without the voice output, through icons placed on a pillow case (Anthony and Judy Robertson, 1 Voice weekend, Blackpool, December 2000) or on Perspex (see AAC: Encoding: Colour Coding).

The full set of 128 LLL icons will be placed on a Perspex Eye Transfer Frame, and one of two methods will be used to point the VOCA user to the Gazer's target icons. Either:

  1. Colour-coded letters and numbers will be used to locate the colum and row coordinates of an icons' cell, or
  2. The icon set will be divided into a set of 8* mini grids of 4 columns and 4 rows, and with a coloured ribbon passing behind the icons in each row and column, to give each icon a three-component file path of grid colour, column colour, and row colour.

If a 'gazer' was blind, the VOCA user would call out the colours in sequence and the blind gazer would give a halt signal at each colour needed to identify the locations to desired items on the grid. The blind gazer would have to know where the desired icons, or the letters and numbers used to reference them, were located on the Perspex first for this to work.

*Note: There are only six mini grids in the example picture to the right at top of page, because it was made when we thought we were going to trial a Vanguard from CAP, and Vanguard LLL only displays 84 icons on the main grid. We need to set up an Eye-Tran frame with 8 mini grids for our Pathfinder LLL 128-icon system.

The first two graphics top of page link to Janet Scott's Teddies with Badges presentation, and the third links to our colour coding page with how Janet's presentation introduced us to eye-pointing. The term TwinSpeak is inspired by Minspeak being so suitable for eye-gazing, and that it takes two to do it.