Category: Nice-Tech

Very mildly geeky – technophobes can safely tread this way . . .

New salt-mine blog

Liz Panton1 Comment
Montage of images of landmarks in the North East and Cumbria

After 10 years of hand-coding websites (charmingly amateurish? quaint? a bit of a dog’s breakfast?) and leaving muddy paw-prints on various platforms around the blogosphere – time for a change, to a format a bit more in keeping with the professional function.

However . . . as well as importing serious, sensible content from the old blogs, sites and twitter, I have press-ganged Pirate SLT over here too, to add a touch of levity and adventure to the proceedings!

But what a time it has taken to find an accessible theme for WordPress that is not too tricky to set up – and actually works! At the time of posting I am trying “RedLine“.  There seems to be something not quite right with all of the “accessible” themes. In this one, hyperlinks are not automatically underlined by default, so I hope that I can fix that easily in the css.

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How long does it take to learn to use a MinSpeak-based AAC system?

Liz Panton8 Comments

This blog post contains extracts from a message that I posted to the CM-AAC-Forum in 2009, as one of many contributors to a lengthy discussion about “Icon vs Text Based Communication Systems”. This was was one of several branches of a thread that had originated with a discussion about word prediction software.

The question, “How long does it take to learn to use a MinSpeak-based system?”,  is just as valid for any other AAC system, but there is a particular reason why I am concerned about the MinSpeak question.  This is that I have been quoted as reporting in 1989 that it took 200 hours of direct therapy to teach a cognitively intact adult to use a MinSpeak system fully.  I was a bit baffled by this as I did not recall ever have said any such thing and could not imagine where this “fact” had come from.
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#HELLO_2011 One-off Request for AAC Journeys on behalf of The Communication Trust. 2011: UK National Year of Communication @HELLO_2011

Liz PantonLeave a comment
Via Anna Reeves, National AAC Coordinator, this is a one-off request for AAC Journeys/Stories on behalf of the Communication Trust…

 

Welcome and a Happy Hello to 2011! 2011 is the National Year of Communication which is run by The Communication Trust with the help of the Communication Consortium, a coalition of over 40 leading voluntary sector organisations, of which Communication Matters is a member. A whole range of activities, events, and themes are planned for the year so keep an eye out at www.hello.org.uk and for more detailed background information, go to www.thecommunicationtrust.org.uk/hello

To launch the Year, the Hello campaign is doing a big media push at the end of January. To raise awareness of the importance of the issue of children’s communication at the launch, they need some powerful case studies to position the human impact of speech, language and communication needs in the national media.

If anyone relates to the following journeys and would be willing to share their journeys/stories for this purpose then please contact Annie Broadbent on or 0207 843 2564.


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