Communication Matters - Deb's Top Three
9th October 2017
Deb is an Assistant Speech and Language Therapist within the EAT Department who attended the Communication Matters Conference this year - here are her three main learning points:
1.Low Tech Resources
We work in a team which is surrounded by high-tech devices but it was useful to take some time out to consider the importance of low tech resources and having access to them.I went to different talks given by AAC users, and they all used low tech resources before they had their AAC device. These gave the AAC users a voice but were not without their difficulties as well, for example they can be time consuming for local services, parents and carers. Finding the balance between high and low tech systems continues to be something that we work on in the service. We are going to try to have a bank of resources on this website for people to download and use.
2. Analysis of a low tech AAC to improve Scanning efficiency
I attended a talk on being aware of the use of QWERTY, ABC/ Frequency alphabet charts – patient’s personal preference as a low tech option. This, again made me think about how we support local services and whether downloadable resources for local services would be useful to show just how much you can get out of an alphabet chart.
It also made me think about looking at the ways we continue to support the patient from low tech to high tech AAC device and the software and ongoing programming to increase accuracy and speed with different scanning methods. What we include in the grid sets: core words, abbreviations, expansions , predictive words, operational and navigation keys, etc.
3. AAC apps
Finally I got chance to look at some of the apps on the iPad and other devices, some of which we work with every day and some of which are more unusual. These included Predictable on Windows devices using eye gaze cameras and ChatAble on the iPad. I also got chance to look at Boardmaker online which will be helpful when working with our colleagues in schools.
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