3rd Oct 2022

Hey All!

Back by popular demand, my update emails! In case you are new since my last update, (WELCOME!) I send these update emails once a week(ish) to let everyone know what I am working on and ask for feedback about various projects. If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions I am always happy to hear them.

CRM

Recently a team of us have been working hard trying to figure out the best way to setup the Customer Relationship Management system. The goal of this system is for us to manage our communication with customers of our various services in one place.

We got a bit stuck on some of the technical detail of how-to setup the CRM but this week we had a very encouraging call with our CRM partner (Access CRM) who helped us figure out the details. There is still more work to be done to get the system exactly the way we want it for our use cases, but we now have all the tools to get us there which is half the battle!

Pasco

PASCO is an AAC App developed by the Ace Centre to support people who require auditory scanning only.

Over the years PASCO has become slightly buggy, over time the number of bugs built up so we have recently spent time fixing these bugs. We are currently working with the original develop to overhaul the codebase. End users won't see any difference with the app, other than it will be more reliable which is a huge step forward. We are still testing the new version, so its not live on the app store yet but if you want to test it let me know and I can get you setup with the test version of the app! Once we have finished ironing out all the issues we will release the new version to everyone

EyeCommander

EyeCommander is a desktop application developed by Ace Centre that uses the front facing camera of any Windows device to detect when you blink which is then used as a switch output.

We want to make EyeCommander run more efficiently on devices and detect blinks more accurately. This is a big task and not one we can do alone so we have spent some time trying to figure out the best way forward. I spent some time this week looking at various grant opportunities and partnerships to help us do the work required.

Website

As always, the website has been constantly updating with new resources and new information.

This week we added a new resource to the site about picking a vocabulary: https://acecentre.org.uk/resources/identifying-vocabulary-to-personalise-aac

I have also done some work with Karen and Suz around our LAACES webpage to make it as helpful as possible to our local services. This is still a work in progress, so I will let you know once the changes are live.