some new autism/AAC projects are set to go

have been thinking about joel smiths amazing application JTalk for a while now,and wondering if he woud ever have the time to update it,as the next version has been in development for as long as duke nukem forever [sort of....not really].

had been a huge fan and daily user of JTalk-nothing commercial,bar the unaffordable AAC handhelds were comparable-joel had made a huge breakthrough in open source AAC.
but it was programmed using an old version of .NET and it requires a very old framework to run,its hard to get hold of and quite fiddly to get around-with each new laptop and new windows have had its gotten harder and harder to fiddle with,woud love to have an update on it.


am going to start off a project on making a similar AAC set up to JTalk,these are the functions/options am hoping for:

• text to speech-type in anything for it to be spoken out
  
• have set boxes-like with JTalk,for users or their family/support staff to pre set with their own comments/words to use,so that the user only has to click on the box to trigger speech.
• have pictures next to words or a picture only option,for those who struggle with written language or have no understanding of it at all.
• have a time line option,for users to show what they want to do on their timeline,or so they can see what they will be doing,using PECS type pictures.

-am going to be writing it in .NET and like JTalk which was also coded in [earlier] .NET it will have framework dependencies,so only modern windows systems will be able to run it.
am especialy hoping to help all other autistic people of any age communicate better,to stop people speaking for us like they so often do when we are non verbal,its just an idea at this stage but am going to ask staff about the possibility of getting people am living with involved with trying it out to so that people of all functional skills get involved,it woud be nice to, to get others involved.
woud get non autistics involved to,to make sure its fully understandable.




the next project have got lined up is [and dont laugh at this because it isnt actualy as dodgy as it sounds] a autistic translator.
the idea,had come to self because am constantly feeling like a foreigner never understanding what people are saying,a lot of it is to do with language difficulties in own case but woud like
to make a translator for all literal stuff and any other terms we struggle with due to our autism.
will see if any support staff woud be up for the challenge of coming up with all the definitions,and unsure at the moment,but might make it so that there is both a speech and text version of the term for translation.



now,have got another project plan to,hoping to make a PECS program similar to boardmaker,
because its an absolut fucking con at making people who dont belong to big businesses pay for their fricking security locked down software.
we have it here,and have got it on old laptop,but trouble is it requires the disc to run as part of the security shit,and have not even got a dvd drive on this laptop [thin as a netbook].
we havent got anything in the open source community that even slightly compares so woud like to program something for all autistics,families,carers,support staff,teachers, speech therapists etc who cannot afford board maker,hopefuly will be able to fuck em and use something free.