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AAC app for children with speech disabilities

ABOUT

An Android application for people with speech disabilities, a generic and easy to learn communication method for anyone with speech disabilities that forms grammatically correct sentences from a list of pictograms clicked and reads them (text-to-speech). Because of pictograms it's especially good for children on ones who have limited reading abilities.

It is different from most of existing products by being free, by it's grammatically correct natural language generation features (inflection, tenses, using the setting user gender to alter first person sentences1 and more) and by usage of gesture search on mobile phones where keyboard is not reliable because is small screen.

Also, my friends have found it to be a fun toy to learn basics of foreign language :)

The application includes ~5000 icons obtained from arasaac.org, where ~900 are properly categorized, and others are accessible through search. It supports French language well, and there is an early prototype for English too.

Other features include:

  • recent phrases and pictogram history (each category lists most used ones on top) accessibility
  • for easier identification icons tagged with the 6 SPC colors (actions, names, descriptives etc)
  • option to display text in capital letters
  • compatibility with both Tablets and mobile phones

Below application screen-shots on mobile phone. On tablet everything is bigger and fits more icons.

DONATE TO HELP THIS IMPROVE

If you liked the application, you are very welcome to donate. That would allow me to add new features and improvements more quickly:

Donate safely through PayPal

INSTALATION

Requirements: Android 2.3+

About Languages and Text-to-Speech:

  • to use French or English you have to set your phone/tablet language to the one you wish to use (go to your phone Settings)
  • you will also need text to speech engine to be installed (go to Settings->Install voice data etc).
    • For much higher quality voices you may get the SVOX voices from android market ( https://market.android.com/details?id=com.svox.classic ) for around 3 EUR (include free fully featured two week trial). Note: I'm not affiliated with them, just used and liked their quality.
  • English support is still experimental

CURRENT ISSUES

  • many of the icons are not correctly part-of-speech tagged (this is hard manual work; we use some simple guesses), so have in mind that the application may not allways give expected results

  • Very large phones (smaller than tablet) -- shall still be in phone mode (with flig changing windows)

REPORTING PROBLEMS

To report a bug or other problem, submit a ticket at GitHub: https://github.com/vidma/aac-speech-android/issues/new

LICENSE

This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/ .

CONTENT LICENSE

The application includes 5000+ ARASAAC pictograms limited to non-commercial use (Creative Commons) that must be redistributed under the same licence.

  • Author of the pictograms: Sergio Palao
  • Origin: ARASAAC
  • License: CC (BY-NC-SA)

DEVELOPMENT

just use eclipse and import the the project

FUTURE WORK

  • possibility to manually add words
  • clean up the icon-set
    • see if better categorizations are possible
    • provide better part-of-speech tags
    • remove duplicate icons so that only best icons are selected for each word (currently any icon is selected)
  • extend/improve natural language processing
    • automatic guessing, compound words: avoir besoin etc, add other question and negation types (ne..que, ne..guerre etc, in addition to ne .. pas)
  • extend user interface
    • more options for word icons (e.g. overriding number/gender for each icon)
    • better UI for tablets: have filtering options on the side of category view
  • extend English functionality
  • misc
    • could we further speed up the loading time?
    • Gesture search do not handle French accents yet (bug in Google's app) currently we use the ascii version of French word for search

ISSUES FIXED JUST NOW

  • improved English support
    • automatic gerund/infinitive for verbs with like/want/to be as a modal
    • now pronouns work as expected
    • icons for English included (selected to match the French ones)
  • installation was very slow
  • adjectives now allways agree gender and number with noun

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Alternative communication (AAC) icon-sequence-to-speech app for children with speech disabilities

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