For My Self Made Talker

The most important point was to get the software right. I decided to go for the Grid from sensory software,
as the grid is very dynamic and robust. However, the grids were not suitable for my requirements.
After using a talker for over 15 years, I had good idea on how to design the grids. So I decided to design
and create my own grids in October 2003. I will be controlling the grid software with a single head switch,
therefore the grids are designed around the most used cells and should be in the left hand corner.
The grids are up to 64 cells to make the access faster to the sub-grids. The light talker had 128 cells
therefore it used to take ages to reach the right hand side of the grid.

I have designed the grids without any pictures\icons as I personally think this looks juvenile for a
31-year-old man to have a smiley sunshine, or a young girl on the grid. And also without any pictures
the grids can be really small and as a result there is more viewing space. i.e. I can tell a story without
scrolling up and down the page.

The speech synthesizer is an additional program called TextAloud. I was amazed when I first heard it,
as it sounds like a human voice. The natural voices provide the highest measured naturalness and
intelligibility what I have ever seen in my life, as the high standards of quality of voices are just
remarkable. For more info go to www.nextup.com

I didn't like the built in text area on the grid software as it was too small. So I designed the grids around
Microsoft Word. I had a major problem so I emailed Sensory Software but even they didn't know how
to solve it. I wanted to use the power options to turn off hard drive and screen when I'm not using it to
save my laptop battery but the switch signal is too weak to wake up the laptop. This was hard to figure
out how to do but I did it! Email me if you want to know how!

Here is the main grid with MS word!

Spell Mode is designed with frequent letters on the left top

A close-up of the main grid

As you can see from the main grid I have 17 common verbs (get, put, go, give etc..) In these verb grids I
didn't want just single words because it would be faster if I had multiples of words, which are related to the
particular verb.

Here is the "Do" grid

Here is the "Go" grid

Here is the "Action" grid

Here is the "How" grid

Here is the "Calendar" grid

There are 3 sub grids coming off this one (Dates,Celebrations, day times)

Here is the "Dates" grid

 

I designed the grids in the way of living as this would be easy to locate the words, especially the uncommon
words. On my light talker it was really hard to remember the location of the words, as I had to press
2 or 3 icons to obtain a single word. Therefore my system is based on areas such as living room, bathroom,
garden, buildings etc… If I wanted to type "smoke alarm", I would select hallway grid as most people has
smoke alarms in their hallways.

Here is the "Hallway" grid

As you can see, there is another sub grid called "Gas Cupboard" Once again most people have a gas
cupboard in the hallway

Here is the "Gas cupboard" grid

Here is the "Bathroom" grid

 

Here is the "Buildings" grid

Here is the "Shop Names" grid

Here is the "Garden" grid

Here is the "Gardening Tools" grid

You have seen 8% of the grids as I have created over 200 grids.