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.
In the last two months the project team have been out and about disseminating the latest information about the Arabic Symbol Dictionary across four continents!
But one of the most searching questions posed by Katerina Mavrou from Cyprus was how we would be maintaining the project once the funding had expired and we felt that this would be tough at the level it was being maintained at present and admitted as much when asked about new symbols and how these would be achieved – Would crowdsourcing work? They are all available under a creative commons licence and are free for all to use.
Whilst this was going on Nawar Halabi was at The Sixth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies. This was a satellite workshop of the Interspeech 2015 conference of the presentation was on the system developed to find an Arabic core vocabulary for the dictionary. Generating acceptable Arabic Core Vocabularies and Symbols for AAC users (download .pdf)
The following week on the 13th -15th September, a poster was presented a Communication Matters which will be followed up by an article in their journal. During the two days there was a chance to meet those working with companies and therapists with an interest in symbols relating to the use of the Arabic language and its culture.
David Banes was then involved in a DRT4ALL forum discussion in Madrid about the global trends in technology and accessibility where he discussed the use of the symbols being developed.
E.A also escaped to Spain to meet up with the ARASAAC team in Zaragoza where they were kind enough to spend time discussing aspects of their symbol creation and in particular very interesting booklets for museums, libraries and other materials. It was wonderful being able to finally really discuss the collaboration and the way we are licensing our symbols.
Closing the Gap will beheld late in October And a member of the Mada team has been provided with leaflets about Tawasol symbols for those interested in AAC so that a month into the launch of the website USA is the next continent on the list to receive news about the project
Later in October the ASSETS 2015 conference will be held in Lisbon and a poster about the voting and online symbol management system was presented. Meanwhile David is once again attending a forum Meeting, This time with UN DESA/DSPD (Disability and development – Disability Inclusion and Accessible Urban Development) linking up with Nairobi Kenya. We could say this is the fourth continent In two months!
The AAATE and ASSETS papers are available from the publishes and will be added to eprints once they are available.
November brings the WISE Summit in Doha with the workshop and then there is preparation for 2016 and Arab Health in Dubai, Possibly a ATIA in USA, The Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference 2016 (ARC’16), Innovation Arabia 9 and ICCHP 2016 in Austria and ICCHP 2016 in Canada before Communication Matters once again if all goes well.
Dr Ouadie Sabia has joined the team as a consultant specialist in linguistics and has provided us with essential support regarding the accuracy of Modern Standard Arabic lexical entries that are being added to our database. Initially he queried the way we were categorising the lexical entries as they needed to be used for both spoken communication and literacy which, when one is coping with a diglossic language does not necessarily work. There is an insightful blog on the subject written by Michael Erdman titled “Is Arabic really a single language?”
An introduction to the root and pattern system in Arabic from Arabic Learning
However Dr Sabia persevered with his support for our work and commented “This is a common problem with languages such as Arabic where words are derived from one root and might appear without the correct diacritics or even non-existent diacritics. It can be hard to determine their grammatical category. “ذهب” could mean “to go” or “he went” (verb) but could also mean “gold” (noun). Because the diacritics are missing, the grammatical category is unidentifiable. However in many cases the context plays a crucial role in categorising words in Arabic. This has been proven when developing an Arabic TTS corpora. I have added the appropriate diacritics to make over a thousand Arabic sentences, readable, understandable and grammatically accurate. I also monitored the recording carried out by a talent to make sure that all the diacritics were correctly used in order to preserve the grammatical accuracy. A word function can be altered if the diacritics are incorrectly placed. Another issues is that by changing just one diacritic we can go from a subject function in a sentence to an object function, without even changing the word order in a sentence.”
Another issue that has had to dealt with over the last few months is the inaccuracies that develop when working with English verbs that tend to be presented in the present tense and those needed in Arabic that are essentially always given as part tense. Much discussion has resulted in the latter winning the day with a recognition that if ARASAAC symbols for verbs come with a label including ‘to’ such as ‘to go’ the ‘to’ will be removed to that the verb can be declined in any tense and with or without a pronoun. All the verbs have now been checked by Dr Sabia and sentences added to further explain the meaning.
Arabic verb analyser
As Dr Sabia explains, “Having spent a reasonable time studying the lists, I have reached a clear idea about the type of tense we should be using to translate the Arabic past tense 3rd person singular masculine as the “infinitive” to + verb” in English. Arabic verbs have the form: “he + past tense” (merged) and this has to appear in the dictionary. The second point is that the symbol user who wishes to gain literacy skills will only have to learn the declined forms. In other words, if we take the verb ذَهَبَ (he went) as an example, it will be used to teach the action of “going” in the past as a single male, then later, in order to teach the same action of “going” (male single) in the present tense, a newly declined form يَذْهَبْ would be used. Infinitive does not exist in Arabic grammar. As a result, a translation of a verb such as ذَهَبَ has become “go”. Verbs like “have” in English are prepositional groups in Arabic. However, for communication purposes, the team has decided to call them verbs too but this needs further discussion.
Further work has included the correction of all the AAC lists collected by the team so that they could be uploaded to the symbol management system along with 500 words that are now considered to be the most useful words for the AAC users and have become the core of the Arabic Symbol Dictionary. The analysis of the frequency of use from a grammatical point of view, it has become clear that the lists have presented wide variations in terms of the Parts of Speech being used. Most top 100 core entries from Kelly, Beukelman, Buckwalter, Oweini-Hazoury have a very low frequency of nouns / verbs compared to Supreme Education Council list taken from reading books. A more detailed description of the findings is available in a paper presented at the 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies that will be provided once the publication is available. There were also found to be distinct differences between the types of words found in English AAC user lists compared to the Arabic AAC user lists with more nouns in the latter and it is worth remembering the comments related to the use of a verb which is combined with a pronoun in Arabic.
Another task has been related to the importance of generating correctly spoken words when the Text to Speech part of the project is included in the dictionary. This is where the diacritisation is so important for correct pronunciation of the Arabic words and much time has been spent on making sure over 1129 entries are correct. Dr Sabia has also added all the missing SUKUUN and SHADDA to the definite articles to allow for correct reading of Moon / Sun letters.
As communication boards using Tawasol symbols with Arabic entries have been developed Dr Sabia has been checking their accuracy as part of the ongoing evaluation process and these are being taken out into clinics for trials. ARASAAC symbols are also being used where the image is acceptable and the English is translated.
Work is also being undertaken to decide which words need to become symbols but are represented as the actual word as well as abstract images. Examples include linking words such as “and”, “to”, “until” along with the need to make decisions around verbs such as “is”, “are”, “were” which have no equivalent in Arabic because the verb “to be” does not exist. Although, the symbol manager has to have this rather important verb in English!
All this work lays the foundation for the Tawasol website that will be launched in the coming months and once again Dr Sabia has helped us by translating the content into Arabic.
The last two months have seen some members of the team taking time out, one member heading off to carry out research at MIT and two members introduced us to their new daughters! Other members of the team have been on holiday, not all to sunny climes!
However the work has continued and from a research perspective we have been looking at a collection of Arabic core vocabularies to analyse the differences between our own Doha AAC lists and other lists of frequently used words on the web, in conversational situations and for language learning.
The Doha Arabic AAC lists are made up of a collection of the most commonly used words as collated by special needs teachers, therapists (e.g. speech therapists and occupational therapists) and parents. These lists also include the referents for symbols from AAC user workbooks, AAC devices, therapist progress notes of symbols worked on in therapy, and commonly used symbol signage around special needs centres and facilities.
The Arabic most frequently used words have come from individuals’ comments on the Aljazeera websites which were often posted in colloquial Arabic and collected by Dr Wajdi Zaghouani plus another list of words collected in lectures, the KELLY Project (Keywords for Language Learning for young and adults alike) and Buckwalter and Parkinson’s Frequency Dictionary of Arabic: Core Vocabulary for Learners.
There were also several lists based on words needed to encourage literacy skills such as the Supreme Education Council standards (Grade 1, 2, 3 and kindergarten, Ahmad Oweini and Katia Hazoury’s list of Sight words based on a collection of words gathered from popular reading books in Lebanon (grades K to 3)
On the English side the word lists have come from the research collected early on in the project linked to the work of Hill and Romich, Blandin and Iacono, Benajee et al, Van Tatenhove and Beukelman et al. Some frequency lists are based on the General Core Vocabulary (GCV) measure.
The analysis of these lists has been written up in a paper for the 6th Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies in Dresden as part of a larger Interspeech conference and will be published after the event in November2015. In essence we took our Doha lists and compared them to the other collections to see whether there were any major differences and which words we also needed to include in our lists to develop symbols that would aid communication and literacy skills. We not only found that there were several differences in the vocabularies but also in comparison to the English lists, there were many more nouns.
In English Boenish and Soto state that the use of nouns goes from 7% in the top 100 words to 20% in the top 300 whereas in MSA the corresponding frequency levels are 26% and 45% according Buckwalter and Parkinsons’ lists. When looking at the English AAC user list this appears to be true but when looking at the Doha AAC lists there are many more nouns and one has to wonder whether this is due to the make up of the Arabic language or that it is much easier to develop symbols related to concrete objects rather than abstract feelings, concepts or happenings!
More analysis will need to be done in the coming months, but in the meantime the voting sessions continue with the acceptance of symbols and this process was explained in another poster for the ASSETS 2015 conference. The support for literacy skills for Arabic AAC users will be the topic for a poster at Communication Matters in UK and a paper on our participatory approach to the development of the Arabic Symbol Dictionary will be presented at AAATE 2015 also in the first week of September, 2015.
References
W. Zaghouani, “Critical Survey of the Freely Available Arabic Corpora,” In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’2014), OSACT Workshop. Rejkavik, Iceland, 26-31 May 2014.
A. Kilgarriff, F. Charalabopoulou, M. Gavrilidou, J. B. Johannessen, S. Khalil, S. J. Kokkinakis and Volodina, E. “Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages,” Language Resources and Evaluation, 1-43 2013.
W. Zaghouani, B. Mohit, N. Habash, O.Obeid, N. Tomeh, and K. Oflazer. “Large-scale Arabic Error Annotation: Guidelines and Framework,” In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’2014). Rejkavik, Iceland, 26-31 May 2014.
Oweini and K. Hazoury, “Towards a list of Awards a Sight Word List in Arabic,” International Review of Education, 56 (4), 457-478 2010.
K. Hill, and B. Romich, 100 Frequently Used Core Words. Accessed May 2015 https://aaclanguagelab.com/files/100highfrequencycorewords2.pdf
K. Hill, and B. Romich, “A summary measure clinical report for characterizing AAC performance,” Proceedings of the RESNA ’01 Annual Conference, Reno, NV. pp 55-57. 2001.
J. Boenisch and G. Soto, “The Oral Core Vocabulary of Typically Developing English-Speaking School-Aged Children,” Implications for AAC Practice. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, pp.77–84. 2015.
Balandin and T. Iacono, “A few well-chosen words,” Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 14(September), 147–161 1998.
Banajee, C. Dicarlo, and S. Buras Stricklin, “Core Vocabulary Determination for Toddlers,” Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 19(2), 67–73. 2003.
Beukelman, D. R., Yorkston, K. M., Poblete, M., & Naranjo, C. (1984). Frequency of Word Occurbence in Communication Samples Produced by Adult Communication Aid Users. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 49(4), 360-367.
T. Buckwalter and D. Parkinson, “A frequency dictionary of Arabic: Core vocabulary for learners,” Routledge. 2014.
G. M. Van Tatenhove, “Building Language Competence With Students Using AAC Devices: Six Challenges,” Perspectives on Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 18(2), 38–47 2009.
P. Hatch, L. Geist, and K. Erickson, “Teaching Core Vocabulary Words and Symbols to Students with Complex Communication Needs,” Presented at Assistive Technology Industry Association, 2015. Retrieved 19/2/2015 fromhttp://www.med.unc.edu/ahs/clds/files/conference-hand-outs/atia_2015.pdf (Accessed 14 June 2015).
The website development has begun as more symbols are being added to the database and over 120 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…
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.
In recent weeks Nadine has begun to develop communication boards that are using the Arabic Symbol Dictionary customised symbols alongside ARASAAC symbols. This is all part of the ongoing development and evaluation process with participants in particular AAC users whose opinions we are seeking. Examples are provided below as a slide share presentation and soon therapists will be able to download the sample symbols developed under a creative commons license.
Introducing Mohammed, a 24 year old symbol user from Qatar who communicates using a Tobii eye gaze system. Mohammed has worked with a speech and language therapist to develop a personalised vocabulary that includes the use of localised and culturally sensitive symbols in particular those related to his religion.
Mohammed was finding it hard to take part in the daily prayers as a Muslim and felt isolated when other members of the family worked through the various actions and he had to sit quietly watching.
With the support of the Tawasol symbols Mohammed and his therapist worked through his exact requirements and were able to provide a way for him to take part in the prayers with his family that was both respectful and at one with that special part of the day.
When Mohammed was asked about his feelings concerning the new symbols he said:
“Now that I have my system and the graphics I can take a much fuller part in prayer, as each step of the prayer takes place I point my eyes at the symbol that represents that step. I sequence the images through my eyes as others sequence their movements. Its hard to explain how important this is to me, I know there are others who want to take part in prayer alongside their family and community. By working with people who understand, it can be a lot easier to do than you might expect.”
A further quote from the speech therapist indicates the way in which culturally and linguistically sensitive symbol systems can have a huge impact on AAC users.
“Building a system for communication is not just about the people communicating. Here in Qatar we share many daily experiences around our faith and culture, as therapists we are very good at helping people express their physical and emotional needs, but perhaps not so good at helping those that want to express their spiritual need, their belief and faith. it is so easy to ask the wrong questions, and hence never get those crucial answers if there is no common cultural experience.”
Maryam enjoying a weekend out
Finally Maryam has been able to tell her story using symbols that are much more relevant as would be explained at AAATE 2015 later in the year.
Over the last few months Dana Lawand (as the project graphic designer) has been building up a guide to the changes she has been making to the symbols that have been developed for each voting session. Here are just a few of the early guidelines that may help others working in the world of localisation.
Qatari dress code
Emphasis on Qatari dress code in public. How men and women appear in their traditional clothing in public. Culturaly appropriate dress for young women, children are too young for the rules of the dress code so their dress is more colourful and casual and even westernised at times depending on age.
Local Landmarks
Food, museums, animals, sight seeing have been added or adapted to suit the locality – one humped camels and food with a joint rather than small pieces etc.
Arabic language
Words that appear within the boundaries of a symbol have been changed to the Arabic language so calendars, nonsense words used on the phone such as ‘blah, blah, blah and when writing.
Appropriate orthography has been used – numbers go left to right, no capitals, cursive script from right to left.
Skin tone
In the Arabic Gulf area the main skin complexion is tan so this colour has been used for the majority of symbols.
Dress code has been much debated and voted upon with mixed results as has the need for
Appropriate male and female gatherings, the two (men & women) are commonly separated.
Vehicles, homes and technology
In Qatar cars have to cope with desert as well as the city life in the fast lane. Drawings of various types of new model vehicles have been created from the land cruiser to the truck.
The latest smart phones are widely purchased by Qataris and of course contain Arabic numerals and language systems.
Homes owned by Qataris are normally large and have high walls surrounding them, whereas the migrant population tend to live in flats or smaller clusters of houses.
Comparing ARASAAC symbols on left to Arabic Symbol Dictionary versions.
On May 12th, 2015 the Mada Assistive technology Center hosted the first voting session for the second batch of symbols. The session was attended by 10 voters, including 3 Mada staff members, 3 speech therapists from the Child Development Centre in West Bay, 3 staff members from Shafallah special needs school and the Head of the Speech Therapy Department at Qatar Academy.
Via the online symbol management “quick vote system”, participants voted on 66 symbols that had been developed or adapted from the ARASAAC symbol such as “drive” or “Allah” (God).
There was a debate as to the importance of words used in the classroom with older students and those words or phrases needed for daily communication. Some felt that there should be a mix at this stage despite the fact that the words had been provided by schools. Dr. Imad Deeb a speech therapist specializing in developing Arabic literacy programs for people with special needs made the comment that “there are 3 different levels of vocabulary: General academic vocabulary, Specific academic vocabulary and the common vocabulary; (some of) the words presented today are academic and from the MSA (from texts) and the MSA doesn’t represent any dialect, nobody uses these words to communicate, the vocabulary presented today is so different than the level of a child with disability. The words are abstract and complex, they don’t match the needs of our children”
An example of this were the words “collective response” and “manners” (translated from the Arabic list) provided by a school covering a wide age range (K-12). Many voters said that they had never used such a symbol with the AAC users they were supporting, one voter stating, “It’s a very abstract word, very difficult to explain it to a child, I’ve worked with children for more than 20 years, I’ve never used this word, why is it in your list?” But if the Arabic had been adapted to represent ‘everyone answer’ and ‘please be good’ would there have been a different reaction.
“Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.” Voltaire
It was time to re-evaluate the methods used to collect the core vocabularies. It was decided that different lists may have to be targeted at different voters in the AAC forum whilst prioritising the core communication vocabularies. For example 3 lists from a specific special needs school in Qatar had come from the Arabic department who had come together and created the vocabulary based on words commonly used in text books and concepts from Islamic Studies – these were the lists that contained words such as collective response, manners, memorise and even monotheism. All the other lists were based on symbols used in conversation or taken directly from classrooms including visual timetables, communication boards, grids, what speech therapists working with AAC users perceived as the most commonly used symbols and symbols used for signage around the special needs school. By keeping the 3 curriculum based lists separate the final core vocabulary list reflected a communication based vocabulary and any more complex words or word phrases would be kept for a separate higher level literacy based vocabulary.
The team also discussed the possibility of arranging for a group of users, parents and professionals supporting AAC users to vote on the final core vocabulary; to add and remove words they believed should or shouldn’t be in place. In this way there would be a local consensus that the collected data was valid based on usage. This was actually a suggestion that originally came from one of the voters “you have to set your proper list of vocabulary and invite us to vote on the list before starting to create new symbols” ! It highlights the value of using a participatory approach and including users and their supporters in the decision making processes.
There was also another discussion about the clothing type to be used throughout the Arabic Symbol dictionary i.e. traditional Qatari clothing (black dress and hijab for women and white dress and headpiece for men) or clothing more suitable for the broader Arab region (coloured clothing with hijab for women). One speech therapist explained how her Egyptian student would not be able to identify with the character in our symbol that was wearing Qatari clothing. She also questioned what the scenario would be like for a Qatari AAC user who travelled abroad. Her suggestion was that we use stick figures. The team had already discussed this issue at the beginning of the symbol designing process, and decided that this problem needed to be put to those who would be using the symbols most. A symbol survey was created which 50 therapists, parents and special needs teachers completed regarding their preference for clothing type (Qatari vs Arab clothing) and drawing type (stick figures vs full drawing of male and female characters). The results noted in the previous blog entry showed a preference for clothing that represented the broader Arab region and full drawing depictions as opposed to stick figures.
The team has realized how passionate everyone is for their opinions to be heard as all have valid rationales for their preferences. In order for the dictionary to be useful and for it to be used, it is essential to cater for the broadest range of users and supporters possible. it has been decided to incorporate characters with Qatari clothing in the situation where there are more than one character but leaving the majority of characters in Arab clothing. Furthermore, it will be possible to make as many stick figure options available via the ARASAAC symbol lists as well as those developed for a research project by one of the team members as part of her Master’s degree from the University of St. Joseph in Lebanon.
Voting to decide on types of clothing and types of action symbols
In the past month there have been final voting sessions on the first batch of adapted symbols and the voting on whether symbols should portray individuals just in Qatari dress or a mix and if action words (verbs) where gender is an issue should be portrayed by stick figures or would the dictionary need to have both male and female representations.
More votes on this subject may yet come in from the AAC Forum, but it is felt that the initial 50 votes, as a result of face to face meetings, could be revealed at this stage.
Voting shows 68% want a mix of clothing types
Voting shows 86% want gender specific verbs
Comments for the type of dress needed on the symbols included the following:
“less distracting”, “I like both, but prefer option 1 for Qatar” (voted for just Qatari dress) “one uncovered”, “make one of them dressed in Abaya”, “Make one of the girls wear abaya and one of the males wear a thowb”, “one in abaya and one with no headcover and for male one in thobe”, “add one person from action one”, “I prefer one to wear the abaya, one to wear a normal hijab and one without a hijab”, “with one uncovered hair”, “one girl/boy can be in Arabic traditional dress, one girl can be not covered”,
Comments for the type of drawing needed for verbs included the following:
“To make it more culturally representative and to bring out contrast of figure – around differentiation”, “the colours are clear”, “don’t like stick figures” “colour the stick”.
The decision has been made that we need to have a mix of clothing and verbs will be represented in both male and female where required.
Further voting sessions for adapted symbols took place with AWSAJ Academy teachers working with Arabic AAC users. The online Quick Voting system was used. To date 62 participants’ votes have been logged on the Symbol Manager resulting in 2341 votes for the initial batch of 65 symbols! These now need to be analysed for the comments received and the level of marks given out of 5 for each of the voting criteria – the voters feelings about the symbol generally, whether it was found to be a suitable representation of the word or phrase presented, whether it had sufficient colour contrast levels and cultural sensitivity. For all these criteria the average scores were above 3.9. Where individual symbols have received lower scores in any of the criteria further adaptations will be made taking into account any comments received. These redrawn symbols will be submitted for voting once again alongside new symbols developed for the next batch of voting that will take place in May.
Average scores for symbols in Batch 1 all over 3.9 out of 5
Aejaz and Tullah also met up with two young AAC Users on separate occasions. Aejaz set up a batch of 21 symbols on a grid with 5 versions of thumb positions for the 5 scores for A aged 8, with the support of his father he voted on the symbols and the results were positive with only 3 symbols being marked below the mid point as can be seen with the results below.
When working with M in the Shafallah Center, the criteria for voting was simplified to thumbs up for an acceptable symbol straight across for in the middle and thumbs down for a reject. The latter worked well and once again most symbols were found to be acceptable. It is hoped we will have more case studies to share and batch 2 of the adapted symbols will be voted on during May and early June before Ramadan.
Class 2 milestones and patterns in development – Indira Cevallos (slideshare )
It seems amazing that one can spend over a month discussing the intricacies of verbs and how they should be represented in our Arabic / English Symbol dictionary. The team have reached what Speech Therapists may describe as Brown’s stage 2, where we are learning how to represent more grammatical structures from verb tenses to plurals and simple multiword phrases. These can be difficult to translate into representative symbols as well as work across two very different languages. Yet if AAC users are to be able to make use of a core vocabulary and start to develop real language and literacy skills they must be available in any symbol dictionary that is going to be useful.
In English we tend to accept that the verb will be seen initially in the present tense so one would search for ‘play’ as the root word in for example the Oxford English Dictionary . However, in Arabic dictionaries such as The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic compiled by Hans Wehr and edited by J Milton Cowan which has been reviewed as one of the best Arabic English dictionaries by Sa’id (1962) lists of action words are based on the root of the verb usually the imperfect, as an action happening in the past ’ لعب ‘ . This root of three consonants, can then be easily conjugated (if it is regular) with a series of vowel changes and additional prefixes and/or suffixes. http://acon.baykal.be/
So the first dilemma is how do we present our lexical entries – Should the English be in the past or the present? Should the symbols all have additional elements that illustrate the past as their main entry – going from Arabic to English?
How do we represent the past and the future when the writing is going from right to left – is the arrow for past going from right to left or left to right? Widgit offer a very good example of how this is achieved in English with their symbols.
Google offer an example of how this should be achieved on applications and the web when there is a discussion about bi-directionality. In Arabic we will need to mirror all the indicators of past and future as well as any diagonal marks. So lines originally coming from top left down to right will need to change to top right down to left.
In terms of mirroring actions it will depend on what the person is doing but discussions around Arabic etiquette are being represented throughout the symbols with right hand use for anything to do with food and drink and other appropriate actions.
Verbs also have gender specific spellings so representing the word as a symbol – should the verbs have boys or men as well as girls or females carrying out the actions. It may not be possible to have just the one version or a stick figure if we are supporting literacy skills and yet for those who are just getting to grips with AAC clarity and uncluttered symbols will be essential.
There are similar issues with singular and plural – can one just add the equivalent of +s as in ARASAAC symbols or a ++ as in Widgit – neither are needed if the image illustrates the fact that there are more than one. So how relevant are these extras, do they help when teaching concepts for literacy skills? How do we show this change of status in Arabic where plurals are different for male and female individuals – teachers – معلمات معلمون and then inanimate objects for example tables – طاولات and table – طاولة
Finally (for the moment) in Arabic an adjective can change its spelling to fit the noun it follows and just as in English there are irregular words and irregular ways of changing them. So developing guidelines as to how these things will best be represented in symbols is challenging as we reach over 800 Arabic lexical entries!
References
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Sa’id M, F., (1962) Review of The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is an Arabic-English dictionary compiled by Hans Wehr and edited by J Milton Cowan. Language, Vol. 38, No. 3, Part 1 (Jul. – Sep., 1962), pp. 328-330 Published by: Linguistic Society of America. http://www.jstor.org/stable/410799 Accessed: 23 March 2015
United Kingdom
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.
