Over the last few months there have been several presentations around the world about Tawasol Symbols including the GREAT Conference in Doha where Nadine talked about “Making Educational Resources with TAWASOL Symbols to Support Students with Disabilities”.   By chance we will also be showcasing our work at another GREAT meeting – The World Health Organisation Global Research and Education in Assistive Technology (GREAT) Summit in August.

There we will be talking about how Tawasol symbols can be used to enhance AAC outcomes for those working in the Arabic language.  But  as can be seen in this Slideshare presentation there are now several ways of presenting symbols in apps with text to speech output when using portable or mobile technologies such as The Grid, CoughDrop and The Open Voice Factory (used to AzuleJoe).

Other apps that will support Tawasol Symbols with Arabic speech output include

•  TouchChat AAC chat app for Apple iOS systems such as the iPad and iPhone
• Proloquo offers apps such as Proloquo4Text 2.0 with Arabic voices.
• Go Talk Now is a very flexible app that offers other symbol sets with the Acapela voices but also allows the import of personalised images.
• Colourful Semantics in Arabic comes with lots of resources to build on sentence construction and story telling skills.
• The Babnoor app  has been developed in Dubai to support those with Autism and provides an easy to use Arabic interface with its own symbols but others can be added along with local dialect voices.

We know there are more to come and hope to also see Tawasol symbols being used in other language such as Hindi on Jellow – also available in English.