Classifying AAC symbols for ease of use

Low tech to high tech

With thanks to Techcess and the SCORE layout

There has been a long history and much debate about the way we classify AAC symbols for ease of use.  Do we make it easy for people to choose the symbols they want on a communication board from a label?  Should we try to provide categories and if so which ones?  Do we need to think about semantics and the meaning of words, phrases, or text in context as concepts and syntax (sequencing words into grammatically correct sentences) when we are searching?  What happens when people want to make visual displays based on different topics?

These questions become even more important when considering a range of languages which may have very few similarities in particular if they are not part of the European group of languages.  Issues around orthography as well as left to right and right to left placement if one is thinking about text to speech output on electronic devices and moving through a sentence or phrases with a minimal number of selections and distance to cover.

Once again we would like to use share our questions with others in the field in order to make decisions that suit as many AAC users, carers, families and professionals as possible.  Here are some key points in a set of slides available on SlideWiki