To gather more information on how well an existing app (Proloquo2go) convey words, we surveyed 40 students with no speech or motor impairments to see how intuitive existing icons are on AAC devices.
We took five icons from Proloquo2go app and asked 40 students to guess what the icons meant. Each icon represents a word, and people had to guess the word. We chose icons that demonstrate verbs and abstract concepts rather than nouns to demonstrate that symbolic representations of vocabulary used in the app can be difficult to decipher.
Take a guess yourselves! Hover over the picture to reveal the answers!
of interviewees were able to guess the meaning of the words "to" and "will".
of interviewees were able to guess the meaning of the words "who".
of interviewees were able to guess the meaning of the words "different".
of interviewees were able to guess the meaning of the words "in"
From these results, we can conclude that some of the icons used in AAC devices are not good representations of the actions or concepts they are trying to convey. If 40 UW students can't figure out what these icons mean, it could potentially be challenging for someone with a disability to figure out. This shows that the icons for AAC devices need more improvement in being more intuitive for those with disabilities.
Megan Caldwell
Speech and Hearing Sciences faculty; clinical instructor; specializes in working with adults with acquired neurological disorders
Tannalynn Neufeld
Extensive clinical experience supporting children with complex communication challenges
We are reducing cognitive load of the icons and pictures displayed to give better guidance.
We are guiding the users through the sentence construction process by only presenting the users with the different parts of speech at one time, so that the user can choose words that make a functioning sentence. The user starts by choosing a subject then an action and another word after that. In the end it creates a basic grammatical structured sentence that successfully portrays the users feelings.
The user can also select multiple items in a menu to create a compound sentence. Once the user finish creating a more complex sentence, the user is able to send that message to someone on their contact via the internet. (address isolation)
Moving image tells more than a still image: that is why we implement a gif. We can communicate more complex emotions and actions through gifs.
Due to the time limit, we did not have enough time to do a more robust user research. Although our design decisions were based on data, we weren't able to do interviews and usability testing on our prototype with people that have speech impairments. I believe sitting down and directly engaging with our targeted audience would bring us valuable insights on how they interact with their existing technology and their thoughts on our approach with a new app. Therefore, if our group had more time and our next steps would be to conduct usability testing with our target audience and continue to iterate and improve the design.
Obviously, we are not language experts, if you have suggestions on how to improve the language and grammar structure in order to help people learn English easier, feel free to reach out!
Thank you to Divya who introduced this topic idea due to her own experiences with this community!
