7th November 2022

Baton - Text Donation

In partnership with Michigan Technological University we are collecting sentences written by AAC users. These sentences will be used to help improve AAC text entry interfaces. Contributed sentences will become part of a public data set. This data set will be available for download by researchers working to improve AAC text entry interfaces. Will has been involved in this work for a while now.

I am involved in working on the application that we use to collect the sentences written by AAC users. It currently supports pulling the history from Grid3, Communicator and Dasher. This week I spent some time adding support for Predictable users to donate their sentences.

TextAloud

Will has asked me to share a new app that he has been working on called TextAloud.

Some people with disabilities use Text to Speech software to communicate long passages of text. To do this at a natural pace for some people they find it easier for the system to read it aloud sentence by sentence - pressing a button for each sentence - or each paragraph.

This technique is surprisingly not common amongst products such as Natural Reader and clones of this.

TextAloud allows users to read out their speech sentence by sentence or by paragraph, allowing them to deliver a presentation to an audience with the appropriate pauses. You can try the app out yourself on an iOS device by joining the test flight here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/D8VRhWqr

You can pass any feedback onto me or directly to Will

Trinity College Dublin

A while back I spoke to a student from Trinity about a new AAC app they were building which is designed to work with the Irish language. This was interesting to me as we are often talking about how we can support users that speak languages other than English.

Next week I have arranged to have a meeting with them about the work they are doing and hopefully share some of the work we have done digging into our bilingual users as well as research Will has done into getting data about how well different languages are supported by TTS systems.

I am hoping out of our meeting we will have a relationship with the team based at Trinity to work together further on TTS developments going forward.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We have recently been trying to integrate a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system into our workflows. The goal of this system is for us to manage our communication with customers of our various services in one place

As usual Ryan and I have put some time into the CRM this week. This week we started to look at how the CRM changes will effect our privacy policy. We have come up with a list of changes and documents to produce to make sure we fully comply with GDPR and all data protection rules. We also spent some time this morning setting up notifications for training events from within the CRM. This was a MASSIVE win, we have spent so much time working on this and we finally got it working.