next »

[LesleyT]

In work with kids with disabilities, PECS and visual schedules are pretty much the standard -- they usually are line drawings that represent objects or pictures taken of the actual object in context.

The people who have done the protocols are the Pyramid Educational Consultants:
www.pecs.com

Most people use a version of Mayer-Johnson's (vastly overpriced) boardmaker to prepare the materials.  www.mayer-johnson.com

Other icon sets are rapidly falling out of use because of Mayer-Johnson's wide use in the educational market.  But other symbol sets include Bliss, DynaSims, Prentke Romich's Unity and Min-speak icons, and others.  I've found and downloaded some free symbols from the web before too.

Why is this is an issue?

My love is augmentative and alternative communication and I've always seen the XO as almost perfect for that...   (someone tell Mary Lou Jepson to get that touchscreen ready already!)

IconSpeak is almost a perfect prototype. 

But......  for non-signers, like autistic kids and kids with other developmental disabilities, those ASL images are difficult to understand.  We need an image library.

All the other images, as far as I can tell, are so heavily copyrighted and restricted that there is almost NO WAY they would ever be able to go along with OLPC's values -- even if, for instance, they agreed to provide their image libraries to OLPC only for 3rd world laptops, I can't see OLPC going along with that.  Boardmaker is so hard to copy that I know tons of schools with useless boardmaker packages because they can't reinstall and/or can't find a disk.

And this isn't a trivial amount of money that companies get for stuff like this. 
The Tango! a new communication device, runs $8000.
You read that right.
A new dynavox 4 runs about $9000. 

With a proper, open source icon base, we can open up access to augmentative communication for many people.  Does anyone know how to go about getting ahold of one?  I might have to start asking people to take pictures of things with their XO cameras and share those images in the database so we can get started. 

A normally developing 3 year old has 1,100 words, the Prentke Romich webpage says. 

That's a lot of open source icons to get together. 

I'm a bit discouraged. ftp://

[Gabey8]

Holy cow. And I thought that devices with refreshable braille displays cost a lot. (Which they do, unfortunately. A device with functions equivalent to my PDA can run about $6000 or more, depending on its feature set.) Looks like communication devices are right up there in the "regular people can't easily afford this life-changing device" department. Argh.

I have to take a look at these icons, just out of curiosity, because ASL doesn't really have a written form. But I can imagine that maybe some drawings based on ASL signs might qualify as 'free and open source" since, after all, ASL isn't copyrighted and it is a visual way to communicate both concrete and abstract ideas.

I hate the fact that so much assistive tech costs so darn much. I know that the cost to produce each unit is higher because fewer units will be produced and sold, but still... OUCH at some of the price tags on these items.

[tdang]

I don't know what you need, but there's already a surprising amount of F/OS images available. It probably would take a good bit of time to find what qualifies for your needs.

But I also bet if you could describe well what's needed on a wiki (OLPC wiki, or educator wiki: http://www.wikieducator.org/ or WikiCommons http://commons.wikimedia.org/), you could get additional material.

You could search at wiki commons. I found a couple potential categories:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Icons
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:PD-ScottForesman

The wikieducator site pointed out that Flickr has things tagged by Creative Commons license, which you can look for at:
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
or
http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/

[AuntiMame]

IconSpeak is almost a perfect prototype.

But......  for non-signers, like autistic kids and kids with other developmental disabilities, those ASL images are difficult to understand.  We need an image library.

All the other images, as far as I can tell, are so heavily copyrighted and restricted that there is almost NO WAY they would ever be able to go along with OLPC's values -- even if, for instance, they agreed to provide their image libraries to OLPC only for 3rd world laptops, I can't see OLPC going along with that.

Lesley T,
You're discussion of assistive tech and Icon Speak got me to thinking about this as soon as Icon Speak was introduced. And although I've never worked in/with assistive tech I began researching symbology to see what could be used.

In the past few weeks I learned a bit about Bliss symbols, and the symbol system that's used to teach language to chimps, and have been reading books about the cultural and historical use of symbols. And like tdang I've surfed wikimedia commons for images. And I  "speak" ASL (at a toddler's level of comprehension).

Systems like Bliss symbols and the chimp "language" were artificially created and then adopted by others... what's to prevent the same type of creation here? A set of standards about how the sign/symbol/icon is presented (i.e. to make them all appear to come from the same "mind" -- just like the icons used in Sugar have to meet a certain standard). Those standards are driven, in part, by the technology they are being used on (the XO) and need to be defined by both the people who would work with the system and the designers who create the symbols.

Then all you need is a list of words/concepts and a basic idea of how the concept is to be illustrated -- there are lots of illustrators who would help. And not just in the XO world. I guess I'm imagining something like the Pootle translation work that has been done for Sugar: people can sign in and work on one or two icons without promising to complete and entire system's worth......

Ora am I waaaaaay off base?



BTW, my particular interest in this is because my best friend's dad has had 3 strokes and lost the ability to speak (called aphasia). Language is not a problem (in fact he can still read in Latin!) but speech and writing are. Over the past couple of years the family has developed a sort of "personal sign language" to communicate with him -- this gesture means he wants a donut from Dunkins, that gesture means he's looking for the morning paper, etc.  But my friend has looked into the computerized systems that are used to retrain aphasics in speaking... and basically they are $5k software systems that are mostly identical to Icon Speak!



Aunti

[LesleyT]

Thanks guys!  I posted some of these concerns on the wiki. 

I think ASL is rarely appropriate in written form simply because, as Gabey8 said, it's not a written language.  ASL also is culturally specific to the US, while a picture or a drawing of an orange means the same thing to any one who has ever eaten an  orange.


Maybe it's time for a massive open source icon/image library building.  The fact that the xo has a built in camera encourages me somewhat. 

I can't get the newer version of icon speak to work on 656.  Any luck?

I'm also very concerned about the actual use of icon speak.  I am not sure how much the developers have had time to think about the pragmatics of the use of the device.  Is it easy to make a request? Ask  a question? Participate in social conversation?

I'm excited and again, I can't learn to code fast enough!

[AuntiMame]

I can't get the newer version of icon speak to work on 656.  Any luck?

I'm also very concerned about the actual use of icon speak.  I am not sure how much the developers have had time to think about the pragmatics of the use of the device.  Is it easy to make a request? Ask  a question? Participate in social conversation?

I am running it on 656 with no problems. 

And it has a simple database that can be edited using any "Notepad/Wordpad"-ish text editor. So you can build a "dictionary" that is specialized to the person using the system.

I really like the UI mockup at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speech_synthesis#User_Interface_mock-up.2C_as_a_slide_presentation

Aunti

[LesleyT]

I'm having lots of fun with the old version.

I've made it into a Simon Says activity.  All of my kids but one are speaking but it's still good for sentence construction.

I just need to import the symbols now.

I will try the new version again.  It flashes, opens, and then crashes. 

[Emmadw]

Coming rather late to this (& the site's warning me that no-one's posted for over 60 days!)

Have you seen the graphics that University of Victoria, Canada have? http://hcmc.uvic.ca/clipart/ Their licence says that they're free, as long as they're on the web; they might be amenable to use in the majority world via something like the OLPC.

I've also used (& adapted for PNG) Widgit's "Writing With Symbols" software - which is used quite a lot in the UK http://www.widgit.com/ (And tends to be cheaper than Mayer-Johnson) - but not sure that they have linux versions and/ or would be interested in working with you.

[LesleyT]

Nice to meet you Emmadw!

In the US, Mayer-Johnson has absorbed Widgit.  From the project wikki, I'm finding that they are using Imagine Symbols in .png format.  But I haven't been able to get my version of icon speak to run lately and I am bummed about this because I really need it for a girl I work with. 

[LesleyT]

I forgot to add do2learn as one of my favorites as well.
www.do2learn.com