The Responsive Ecologies Lab

Farheen’s testing out the stomp interface of the @ReLabRye AAC device for Ontario Accessibility Innovation Showcase #OntarioAIS. I posted a picture of kamran grinding down some plexiglass for one of the devices in a previous post.

Farheen testing the stomp interface…

The AAC (Augmented and Alternative Communication) is something that our undergraduate research assistants have been working on all summer. They started with an open source ACC unit developed by Jim Wroten‘s Morse2Go.org as a replication project (to confirm the best hardware for the implementation) and a platform to develop new input switches, and design a new 3D printed case to integrate the speaker in a single unit. Though the hardware is the best for the code they developed, we decided to search around for what we thought might be a better input method. We settled upon the H4 (4 button huffman code) method developed by Scott Mackenzie and his grad students at York University.

Presently, we’re working to finalize input methods, such as this unique stop interface, to help people realize that input methods can be anything, and that only through observation and careful communication with an individual can needs of that person be understood, and the best possible input device developed with them. I doubt anyone would need a stomp interface, but it does get you thinking!

We have not developed a standalone H4 version based on Jim’s hardware yet, but we should have it done by the end of the summer. The next step will be to port the code over to new open-source hardware with the goal of simplifying the design and cost while increasing the number of languages that this can be used with to any language that can be represented using roman characters.