Category Archives: website

Welcoming OpenMoji, Guemil and OCHA to GlobalSymbols

United Nations OCHA, OpenMoji and Guemil symbols

Global Symbols now has the OpenMoji symbol set, which comes with an open licence and has been developed by “50+ students and 2 professors of the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd (Design University) and external contributers”.

The Guemil icons come from UC School of Design, Santiago, Chile and are “an open source pictogram initiative, aimed at representing situations of risk and emergency”

Finally, we added the 376 UN OCHA Humanitarian Icons which have a range of emergency images

All these icons or symbols have been developed for informational purposes and at the moment are on the website in English only.

Localised images to aid recognition – What about free localised AAC symbols?

Thanks to a note from Aejaz Zahid about an article on the BBC website we came across a wonderful example of how localised and personalised pictures can help those who find it hard to read or remember important items in their social setting. The article reminds one of the importance of knowing the local situation in which those with literacy difficulties or speech and language disabilities find themselves, and understanding the imagery that brings it alive. Being aware of personalisation and social circumstances cannot be stressed more highly with regards to the way symbols are developed but sometimes it is possible to use readymade versions to speed things up.

In the article titled ‘Spanish grandson’s doodles help grandma find phone numbers’ it is interesting to see that the grandson has used images that perhaps could have been taken from the ARASAAC set of AAC symbols which has been funded by the EU and the Government of Aragon in northeastern Spain, had he known they existed. Examples shown in the photographs include equivalent symbols such as a red cross for medical problems and a hospital, a vet for the dog and a mobile phone number.

red cross hospital mobile phone vet

The more we can spread the news about repositories that have freely available AAC symbols such as the English language OpenSymbols.org or the free application such as PictoSelector that offers a way of making communication boards from the symbol sets it holds, the more we can help people like Pedro Ortega’s grandmother.

We hope that our soon to be multilingual symbol dictionary, will be used by more people wanting these types of pictograms, symbols or images for supporting those with literacy difficulties and cognitive impairments as well as those who need augmentative and alternative forms of communication (AAC) in many languages.

global symbols Did I say multilingual symbol dictionary? Watch this space, we are developing, thanks to a UNICEF innovation fund grant, a way of being able to add new free symbol sets that can be seen in multiple languages – think open source and ConceptNet then possibly in the future AI and machine learning, for a glimpse into the technical side of the sorts of things we want to achieve! Crowdsourcing also comes to mind when errors need correcting and additions have to be added! These symbol sets will all be linked to their owners and we will be stressing the types of licences under which they are provided and hoping you will join us on this new adventure! Símbolos gracias a ARASAAC

Global versus Universal?

“Global” reflects the nuance of culture and language, “Universal” assumes that one size fits all.

voting hands around the world Working with UNICEF and the AAC Cohort is one of the most exciting things we have been doing recently. We have had telemeetings with lots of discussions about opening the world of AAC symbols to the widest possible audience. Topics have ranged from different open licences such as Creative Commons and open source software to what it takes to develop Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) symbols that can be used across the world and on to more complex ideas including Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and AAC!

You might ask why are we thinking about the meaning of words such as ‘Global’ and ‘Universal’ whilst building a symbol repository. We feel that global recognises different languages, cultures, religions and social settings and environments. In part this is because we have promised ourselves that we will not be introducing yet another symbol set that includes symbols that are universally recognised. We accept that there are many symbols that can be said to be universal because they are recognised worldwide, but we are looking at the nuances that occur in different countries and where localisation is important.

what time is it?

What time is it?

drink

We discussed the idea of “Symbols for different settings across the world” when we were working on the Tawasol Symbols in 2016 and looked at some of the issues that W3C highlighted for web developers thinking about localisation and globalisation or internationalisation. such as:

“Numeric, date and time formats
Use of currency
Keyboard usage
Collation and sorting
Symbols, icons and colors
Text and graphics containing references to objects, actions or ideas which, in a given culture, may be subject to misinterpretation or viewed as insensitive.
Varying legal requirements
and many more things.”

We discovered that No.8 ‘many more things’ included the criteria below when working on the Tawasol Symbols and that these features came about as a result of our voting sessions with AAC users, their families, carers and the professionals working with them. criteria for symbol design

Global Symbols aims to ensure that all the open symbols we add will have been reviewed by those using AAC and those involved in supporting AAC users in the locality where they have been developed, whilst also allowing for personalisation.

Watch this spot for all the changes we plan for the Global Symbols web site in the coming months! The first group of symbols will be coming from the UNICEF AAC cohort members – Jellow designed by those developing the app in India and cBoard, developed in Argentina and Israel, at present using the Mulberry Symbols from Straight Street that were voted on by users and AAC supporters in the UK over a period of several years.

hello

We will be updating this blog as we add symbols and please join us on Facebook to discuss the changes! We will also be tweeting about updates

Thank you UNICEF for this very thought provoking, challenging and interesting partnership.

Happy New Year and welcome to our new logo and name

As we start the new year and wish you all the best for 2018, the team behind the research and development of the Arabic Symbol Dictionary have updated their website and renamed it globalsymbols.com.

We want to continue to support communities to develop and host new symbol sets for a range of languages supporting communication and literacy for those with special needs and we hope you will join us on this journey.

Mada, the Qatar Assistive Technology Center will be maintaining Tawasol symbols (keeping the original name on their servers). However, the original Arabic symbol dictionary remains on our secure server with your data and passwords allowing you to have access to all the freely available resources and those we develop in the future alongside links to other similarly licensed materials namely Creative Commons Share Alike Licence (cc-by-40).

This blog will continue to be our way of sharing the research aspect of the international symbol dictionary development, as we explore new ideas.

friends Watch this space as we start to work with colleagues in Pakistan thanks to a travel grant from the Global Challenges Research Fund

Payment for the flights and accommodation will allow a member of the team to visit Lahore and Islamabad. It is hoped that we can find ways of applying for funding to adapt and add to the symbol dictionary to reflect local linguistic concepts and culture with AAC users, families, carers and experts in the region using the online voting systems to develop resources that suit local requirements. It will also be great to have feedback through Facebook as we have done in the past.

Arabic Speech Corpus shared by Dr. Nawar Halabi

respond symbol with audio If you have been using our Arabic symbols page you will have noticed that we have made every phoneme for our lexical entries available as a sound file, so that you can hear how it is pronounced. You can see the audio links at the bottom of the symbol for ‘respond’ in the picture beside this text. This can help those who have literacy skills difficulties as well as those wish to learn Arabic.

Nawar, who has been part of our Tawasol Symbols project from the beginning at the same time as successfully completing his PhD, has made this possible with the development of an Arabic Speech Corpus with support from the University of Southampton and MicrolinkPC.

The synthesised speech output that results from this corpse is a very natural sounding voice, recorded using Levantine Arabic, as heard in and around Damascus. Levantine Arabic is considered one of the three main Arabic dialects and differs from Gulf Arabic in some aspects of grammar and pronunciation although when phonemes are read aloud, they are often nearer Modern Standard Arabic and when combined there is less dialectal impact.

The corpus has been made available for download as a zip file and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. As the Arabic Speech Corpus website says the packages includes:

1813 .wav files containing spoken utterances.
1813 .lab files containing text utterances.
1813 .TextGrid files containing the phoneme labels with time stamps of the boundaries where these occur in the .wav files. These files can be opened using Praat software.
phonetic-transcript.txt which has the form “[wav_filename]” “[Phoneme Sequence]” in every line.
orthographic-transcript.txt which has the form “[wav_filename]” “[Orthographic Transcript]” in every line. Orthography is in Buckwalter Format which is friendlier where there is software that does not read Arabic script. It can be easily converted back to Arabic.
There is an extra 18 minutes of fully annotated corpus (separate from above, but with the same structure as above) which was used to evaluate the corpus (see PhD thesis). Feel free to use this in your applications.

Please contact Nawar Halabi by email for further information.

News from the ISAAC conference and recent work

ISAAC film festival poster The ISAAC 2016 conference in Toronto has seen the launch of our film about Mohammed and his use of the Tawasol symbols for praying. The importance of personalisation and localisation of communication charts to suit user needs is illustrated. The setting of the film takes you to Qatar and straight into a Doha home where one can see the difference listening to participants in this sort of a project can make.

Share and Believe, A Symbolic Journey

Mohammed using his Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) aid to express his feelings about the Tawasol symbols and what he has achieved. We would like to say thank you for his support and his family whilst we have been working to develop freely available symbols that can be used alongside any other symbol sets but take into account Gulf and other Arabic cultural, religious and social settings. The team have been working in collaboration with AAC users, families, teachers and professionals in Doha, Qatar and hope to offer many more symbols in the future that will also help those with literacy and language skill difficulties as well as for use in signage etc.

The team feel this has been one of the most important outcomes of the Arabic Symbol Dictionary – a freely available set of symbols that can work with any other symbol set to support Arabic AAC users, those with literacy skill difficulties and for use in the local environment. We have worked hard with local participants to achieve a mix of Qatari and Arabic dress, religious culture and take into account social etiquette and sensitivities. Much more has to be done and we are working hard to increase the vocabulary in the coming months.

At the conference we were lucky enough to have two papers accepted and here are the PowerPoints that went with the presentations. The ISAAC Conference program provides links to the abstracts
Core Vocabularies: Same or different for Bilingual Language Learning and Literacy Skill building with Symbols?

Core vocabularies for Bilingual Language Learning and Literacy Skill building with Symbols

Developing an Arabic Symbol Dictionary for AAC users: Bridging the Cultural, Social and Linguistic Gap.

Arabic Symbol Dictionary for AAC users: Bridging the Cultural, Social and Linguistic Gap

Finally in the last few weeks we have been working with CommuniKate and Joe Reddington to add all our symbols to two general communication charts in English and Arabic which can be personalised as the charts are built using PowerPoint slides. The system has been developed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and we are very grateful for the support Joe and Kate have given us with the project.

The English test sample chart is available and is best seen using the Firefox browser, but here is a screen grab of the Arabic version that is still being worked on as we want it to work with text to speech in the same way as the English version. When you select a symbol the word appears in the window and the text to speech reads it out. At present the English version is using eSpeak but we need to find a good Arabic voice and the correct sentence construction with the appropriate character word changes as the symbols are selected.

Arabic Communication chart

Adding elements to symbols to enhance their use.

AAC symbols need to be bespoke, personalised and relevant to the time of communication as well as the setting and task being undertaken. However, this is not always possible in the time available with on the spot conversations. Where there is time to adapt symbols the process often has to be carried out in special programs. To over come the need to search out these special programs or apps Tom Lam has developed a very simple online application that allows those looking for symbols on our web site or from any other site to add elements to the original symbol. Changing the usage of a symbol to fit the needs of a particular language (Lundalv et al, 2006) is also important and may require arrows going in different ways such as from left to right to denote past in Arabic but future in English.

Symbol Creator with a symbol for sitting used to make the phrase ‘They are sitting’

We provided examples of how this could be done in a previous blog and now you can experiment and develop your own symbols using the ‘Symbol Creator’ on the Tawasol symbols website. It is possible to add borders, background colours, text labels, arrows , plus or minus symbols that can provide plurals or signs for more or less. Other symbols can be added on top of the first symbol in miniature to offer gender differences etc but as this is on the web it is not possible to change the order that you add things so the first item will go to the back and so on. But you can delete any of the symbols when you highlight them and re-upload to get the order right! We are looking into how we can make this process easier.

Resizing is possible but the canvas has been set to 500×500 pixels to fit with the original size of all the Tawasol symbols. However, you can save the results in several formats and carry out any other adaptations in other graphical packages. Because the Symbol Creator is online it is important to save the final version as a download as soon as possible! This process will wipe what has been done but you can always upload the image again.

Please do try the Symbol Creator and if you could fill in the quick survey to give us some guidance for making future improvements that would be wonderful.

Although the tool will not offer all that can be achieved with a sophisticated commercial program, it will provide an instant method of adapting symbols. There are other online options such as those offered by ARASAAC for symbol creation and phrase making.

Of course, this is only the beginning of a process as Amy Speech and Language Inc demonstrate in their examples of communication boards or stories for symbol users and Lessonpix has a sharing page that provides more resources.

Text2Picto example of a text to symbol translator. CCL KU Leuven

The exciting bit is when one can generate text to symbol sentences that make sense or symbol to text sentences that allow both the symbol user and their friends and family communicate more easily across the airwaves! Have fun with the Text2Picto beta online text to symbol processor. (Sevens et al 2015) to learn more about the issues of sentence generation.

References

Lundälv M, Mühlenbock K, Farre B, Brännström A. SYMBERED – a Symbol-Concept Editing Tool. LREC – Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Genua, 2006, 1476- 81.

Leen Sevens, Vincent Vandeghinste, Ineke Schuurman and Frank Van Eynde (2015). Natural Language Generation from Pictographs. In: Proceedings of 15th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2015). Brighton, UK. [Paper] – See more at: http://picto.ccl.kuleuven.be/publications.html#sthash.lGejRT6q.dpuf

Tawasol symbol website goes live

The Tawasol symbol website has been available for the last two months for beta testing. There are still many updates and fixes to be done but now the site has been submitted to Google and can be found by searching for Tawasol Symbols!

We have been keeping statistics and since October with us all working on the site there are some figures to share. 684 views with 38% coming from new visitors and 62% returning visitors. The visitors come from the following countries:

	Country	Sessions	% Sessions
1.	United Kingdom	62	52.54%
2.	Qatar	31	26.27%
3.	United States	16	13.56%
4.	Saudi Arabia	4	3.39%
5.	Brazil	2	1.69%
6.	France	1	0.85%
7.	Ireland	1	0.85%
8.	Japan	1	0.85%

There have been 21 downloads of symbol files from the home page, with more downloads occurring in Arabic compared to English. Many of these will have been test situations so 12 downloads came from UK, 7 from Qatar and 2 from USA:

	Event Label	Total Events	% Total Events
1.	Arabic zip	12	57.14%
2.	Arabic rar	6	28.57%
3.	English zip	3	14.29%

We are still building the dictionary and the only entries seen on the Tawasol symbol website are those entries that have both Arabic and English lexical concepts. The Symbol Dictionary Management system has many more entries that still require work.

The individual words or phrases can be searched or browsed via category selections and depending on the language chosen once the symbols appear they can be selected to see more information and their links to other symbols of similar meaning or in the opposing language. So a search for ‘camel’ will bring up the English choice that then offers the choices in Arabic.

Search for ‘camel in English to see the selection offered

Select the camel that you want to see with further information relating to that lexical entry

You are now viewing the Arabic lexical entry with the available information if you are using the English side of the website

The Arabic side of the website provides the user with a similar view.

In the coming months there will be over 500 Arabic / English lexical entries (with their appropriate symbols) being the most commonly used words in both languages for AAC use and spoken and written language learning. These words and phrases will be a combination of lists collected from AAC users in both languages and those words collected by external researchers and published as the most frequently used words in both languages gathered from speakers and written works.

Tawasol Symbol Website Development

The website development has begun as more symbols are being added to the database and over 1 vote on url 20 have been accepted by participants voting via the symbol management system. These will be made available on the globalsymbols.com website when it is launched.

Sadly many of the web addresses linked to the use of the word ‘tawasol’ had been taken. The team voted on a collection of addresses that could be used and it was decided that we should also have a re-direct from arabicsymbols.org.

Then we collected the options for website designs provided by Dana, our graphic designer and added them to a Google form in order to have a voting session on which was considered the best option. See below…

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It turned out that Dana’s last version No 4 came out top with 21 to 19 votes being the sum of the different criteria. This has provided the basis for the wire frames that have now been submitted to the team for further comments.

The team decided that where possible in-house designed symbols should appear as guides to content. Pages should be simple and short and work well on portable devices.

The responsive design and accessibility criteria have led to some restrictions in particular to the width of presentation and the number of symbols that can be viewed at once. Two sites separate have been prepared with English and Arabic on offer via a WordPress content management system which means anyone with a login can update basic content.

Issues with downloading symbol files were detected early on in the trials with emails being received from beta testers pointing out the corruption of the Arabic labels. This was resolved when it was discovered that in Windows the process of zipping data caused the corruption to occur – this did not appear to happen on iOS or Mac systems. A .rar compression format is now offered as well and this has solved the problem.

In-house beta testing revealed other issues which were dealt with such as news not appearing and missed links etc at a very basic level. The second phase of development could now start with the introduction of an API (application program interface) to host the dictionary database and filtering system.

International Symbol Dictionary for AAC

Global Symbols for All