Wednesday 29 October 2008

20 Oct: PowerPoint Communication Aid

Here's a screenshot of 340 High Frequency Words on a PowerPoint slide that will speak each word when clicked on (after we copy and paste the recordings from the 2-slide version we made first).


We didn't like it when we couldn't see half of the words at any one time on the 2-slide version, so we reduced them to fit 1 slide. These small words and large number of words on a page won't suit everyone's accessibility needs, but we need to see this set of words all at once for a project we are working on.

Gail Van Tatenhove recommends having all core words in view at once, and we have copied the colour-coding and word arrangement from her Colour Word Board.

The screenshot was taken in full screen SlideShow view. If you can't see it all at once press F11 to make the Menu bars go away. Press F11 again to bring them back.

All 330 words from the Marvin Study are on the slide and we only had to add another dozen to make sure that the Dolch top 200 reading words and the AAC Interview top 100 core words were included.

Note: In a language study with more participants or of longer duration there would hardly be any nouns at all (pale orange words, last two columns). The nouns in the Marvin list are not words that we would all say every day. They are the nouns specific to the few hours of conversation recorded in a study of 6 3-4 years old pre-schoolers in 3 classrooms.

PowerPoint 2007 has a Format option 'Change Picture'. Microsoft's little yellow speakers can be replaced with transparent gifs and recorded sounds can be right on top of something without blotting it out. We found this out while narrating the PowerPoint stories we wrote for Many Stories, One Voice.

Both stories have graphics showing around 80 Toddler's highest frequency words (Banajee, Van Tatenhove) so we turned them into voice output communication aids:




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