I got to know the people who run an IT support group for the disable during my recent sojourn in the UK (http://www.passiton.sco.net), and they recently wrote to me with a problem. I can't do much better than repeat their description:
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We have a client, John, who has profound learning difficulties, but who is starting to learn to make choices in his everyday life and to whom we are about to supply a PC. His mother would be thrilled if he could use his computer to help him with the choice-making.
Hopefully he is going to manage to use a trackball (perhaps with a switch), if not we will try somehow to find enough money to enable him to get a touch screen monitor.
There is some excellent software out there but, of course, at a price (eg ChooseIt Maker2 from Inclusive Technology at £64.88 http://www.inclusive.co.uk/catalogue/acatalog/ChooseIt__Maker_2.html).
AIM:
Example: For John to be able to choose what he would like for pudding.
- His carers can open a grid on-screen with (say) 4 squares visible – pre-loaded with pictures of 4 different puddings John likes.
- When John selects the square he wants (using mouse pointer, touch screen or even perhaps switch), that square becomes highlighted and a sound file is played (eg a recording of one of his carers saying “yoghurt”).
I found some freeware (attached) called CobShell Plus (from http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/obsolete.htm) which does almost exactly what we would like it to:
- you can assign an image (bmp only) to each of 6 squares arranged in a grid over the whole screen.
- when you select the square it can play a wav file and/or open a program.
The problems with CobShell are:
- you can only use bmps. John’s carers are using a digital camera to record the things he can choose from and it would be great if they could simply use jpgs, rather than having to learn the extra step of having to convert them to (probably ENORMOUS!) bmps & resize them etc.
- it can only have one set of options saved at a time – they are saved in the registry as the default options for the program. Ideally we would like John’s carers (some of whom are more computer-literate than others!) to be able to make up as many different grids for him as they liked, save them and recall them easily as needed. The simpler this is for them to do, the better. So for example John could have grids pre-made for many different types of choices, eg: colours / activities / items of clothes / drinks etc, etc.
- although his carers could obviously record spoken descriptions for each option, using Windows sound recorder for example, this means teaching them to use another program, how and where to save the sounds....
- there is not a very significant visual reward when a particular square on the grid is selected (ideally there would be a fairly wide frame round the square which changed colour when selected. Even more ideally each program user could decide what the highlighted colour would be!!).
- Thinking ahead to other clients, it would be fantastic if the program could optionally be accessed by switch (using either scanning or column & row selection – though this also involves all sorts of other parameters being settable – eg speed).
- From a pernickety ease-of-use viewpoint, it would also be very useful if you could a) set the default folders where it searches for images, sounds etc and b) record a wav file directly into the program for each square (but also be able to choose a pre-recorded sound if preferred!)
Does any of this make sense? If so, is it something you (or any other kind people you know) might be able to help us with? I can think of ways of creating it in HTML, or using a program such as GameMaker, but don’t have the skill to make it user-friendly for the carers to set-up, save and edit etc.
"""
I took a look at the cobshell program they sent me, and it really wasn't at all easy for a novice user to bang into shape, and it's very limited.
Truth to tell I have been very busy since my move back to the USA, but I know there are many fabulously skilled and noble-minded individual readers of this list, so I wondered if we could jointly manage to produce a well-engineered solution to John's problem, which hopefully could also help other disabled people.
Sorry this is such a long post. Would anyone be prepared to help me make this software a reality? I am thinking that it should allow someone without much sophistication to prepare menus by grabbing images from the screen (making any image available on the Internet accessible) or from files with simple scaling, and recording sounds to go with them, then adding sets of choices (possibly with a tree structure for complex choices?) to a menu that helpers can easily activate to allow John to make his own decisions.
regards
Steve
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Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com
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