We continue to make slow but important progress on the site. Jo has been working the hardest, with me slacking off rather recently. She has been focusing on the UI that allows people to create their own grids, and this now appears to be working very well.

We recently had a major breakthrough in our symbol issues, by discovering the fantastic team at Straight Street. For those who don’t know about their work, they are developing a library of new symbols which they offer for anyone to use under a creative commons license. This means that applications such as ours can have access to a much larger bank of symbols than would normally be available from the ‘commercial’ symbol producers. Check out http://straight-street.com to find out more.

We want to be able to offer the use of these symbols in EnouncerLite and so it now falls to me to add them to our database. I’ll be working on this as quickly as I can over the next few months to enable a much wider range of words and phrases to be used in the grids.

Well, it’s been over a year since we did any dedicated work on this project, but both of us have been off doing useful things in the meantime.

 Jo has been working on the content management system that hold this site together, and allows the ‘non techy’ people such as myself to add and edit content.  This content management system is available for anyone to purchase for their own website, and you can contact her at Passmore Design if you’d like to find out more.  Due to the way we are hoping to implement the communication aid, she is having to learn an entirely new programming language… so good luck with that!

 I have spent the last 2 years training in Accounting to allow me to better understand the financial side of running a business, and also as a way of generating some income whilst we are still doing this for the love of it!

It’s difficult for casual viewers to see any of the work that has gone on behind the scenes so far.  We have discussed a couple of completely different concepts for the delivery of the communication aid, and have gone back to the drawing board more times than we care to remember.  I guess what’s important is the finished product - and the vision of seeing this as a genuine alternative to dedicated communication aids is still very much alive.

Hi there and welcome to the Enouncer development blog.We’ve been so busy recently, what with having lives and all that, that it’s been difficult to get any real progress up for viewing. Most of the brain-crunching going on at my end is to do with conceptual issues surrounding the presentation of the site and how users can interact with it. Therefore, very little actually makes it to the web.I’m fairly confident now, though, that I am going in te right direction with this, and I hope to have a much more functional VOCA up and running soon.For those who are not awareof the project, and what we are aiming for, we are developing a web-based Voice-Output Communication Aid (VOCA) in an effort to bridge the gap between need and funding that currently exists in the AAC world.I am a former Speech and Language Therapist with quite a few years of (very) technical experience using, programming and teaching communication aid technology. I have a heavy background in computers, and tend to spend lots of time trying to use technology in new ways. Like many other people, during my SLT career I was often frustrated by the difficulty experienced by many people in getting funding for expensive high-end aids, particularly as LEA’s require huge amounts of proof that the child in question can actually use the aid before they will commit money to it.What we are aimingto produce with Enouncer, is a web-based VOCA that will allow potential users to experiment with VOCA technology, without having to come up with the several thousands of pounds necessary to own one. I am aiming to produce a site that professionals who work with this group can use to assess and teach their users, whilst building up a good body of evidence to support a funding application. It is my hope that specialist schools and therapists will not only be able to use it with classes and individuals, but also suggest new ideas and developments for us to incorporate.So if you have any ideas or questions, let us know… all feedback gratefully recieved.