Give Me a Minute idea in use in commercial AAC software

To understand this post, please read the first couple of paragraphs of my give-me-a-minute project page.

The idea presented in give-me-a-minute looks to be making it into commerical AAC products. I don’t pretend that my project influenced this development. Be nice to think it did though… I’ll come back to reality now.

One implementation is as ‘partner windows’ where the text being composed on an AAC display is mirrored to a second screen that faces away from the person composing the test. A pattern that indicates that text is being composed can be displayed instead. This can be easily seen by somebody facing the composer. The partner windows are incorporated in some of the I-series AAC devices made by Tobii Dynavox.

When I presented Give Me a Minue at Communication Matters in 2019, the father of somebody who uses AAC approached me with a concern over the idea. His son sometimes wants to compose private text and not to have anybody else know that he is doing this. Having the text replicated completely removes this privacy. Having a pattern indicating that the device is in use, but not giving away the content, is a step to preserving privacy. Give Me a Minute displays a pattern. The I-series has an option to display a pattern of bouncing dots instead of text. In both cases some privacy is maintained until the final text is delivered as speech. However, even having this pattern on the display gives away some privacy. The father of the AAC user who talked to me indicated that he would want to be able to turn the feature on and off easily.

As I have no access to the AAC software, I don’t have the ability to add this extra feature to Give Me a Minute. The instructions for the partner window software on the I-series is here. It looks like the only way to turn the indicator window on or off is to go through the settings menu.

The Twitter feed where I learned of these developments is here: https://twitter.com/TinaBoardmaker/status/1278723338907660291. My contributions are under the name ‘Oppy’.

Therapy Box plan to incorporate their idea in the next release of their predictable AAC software.