News

AzuleJoe: why PowerPoint?

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Today we’re going to go into a little bit of detail about a choice we made when building our test version of the Open Voice Factory.
One of the unusual things about the video we put out a few months back is the choice of using PowerPoint to edit AAC pagesets.  We’d like to talk about that in a bit more detail today (there was some technical detail about the process here).
So why PowerPoint?

Editing interfaces for AAC devices are hard

Editing interfaces for AAC devices are hard.  Much much harder than the speech interfaces.  It’s simple to write an AAC device that just makes noises (and many of the apps listed on Apps4AAC are exactly that), it’s much much harder to write a decent editing interface.

So it’s hard to do.  It’s particularly hard to do well.  One reason is  because most people (who in the particular context we are looking at are parents, carers, and so on)  who modify the content on AAC devices have low levels of IT literacy: so the design has to be friendly, intuitive, and ‘risk-free’.  If users think they might potentially break a vitial device then they are unlikely to pick it up at all.

There is also something fundamental about the hardware.  Doing any sort of complex task on a tablet is hard. Tablets are portable, pretty, easy to play with and really good for certain tasks like reading books and browsing the internet.  But there is a reason I’m writing this article on a nice clicky keyboard in front of a monitor – some things are just much easier to do off the device.  This isn’t a new insight – most of the major manufactures have a way of editing the device offline – but it’s still a delicate act to put it back on again.  Of course, you then have to maintain two separate editing interfaces and that’s doubled your problems.
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So what did we do? 
I wish we could say we thought carefully about what we needed and came up with a good idea, but in truth I was avoiding even thinking about an editing interface.
I was working on getting the CommuniKate pagesets up and running on the demo and hoping that something would sort itself out.
To make CommuniKate pagesets demos I was looking at the PowerPoint files that Kate was sending me and laboriously writing all of the utterances in by hand.  This was slow and mindless (you can see how it worked in the blog post I did at the time)
It occurred to me that PowerPoint had an open format so  it was possible that I could open up the file and extract  utterances automatically.  Five minutes looking at the internals suggested that this was a bad idea,  but a short browse on the internet found  python-pttx – a library designed to let python programers work with PowerPoint files.
With a certain amount of work, and a lot of fixing things up afterwards. I wrote a short script in python that extracted most of the text from the PowerPoint and reduced my workload a lot.
After a bit of a think,  it started to occur to me that we could make the PowerPoint parser do a lot more.  I mentioned this to a volunteer coder who managed to write the subtle and complex code that extracted the images from the program.  Suddenly we were cooking with gas.    We could create any AAC pageset we liked just by altering a PowerPoint template, and in a way that was deeply intuitive for our users.
We decided to really commit to this, because we started to understand that we might have a really nice alternative to the standard editing interface.  We put up a code bounty to extend the library that we were using and when it was completed, we found that there was only tidying up to do before we had something worth showing off.
Why we think it’s better
We don’t think that all AAC systems should edit the content like this. A lot of the reasons this works really well for us are the results of our general approach rather than this particular feature.
For example, because anyone can upload a PowerPoint file and near-instantly start using the resulting AAC web-app,  it’s clear to anyone that, as long as you keep the old files around, it’s pretty hard to break the system by accident.  This makes it much more fun for people to experiment.  On the other hand, if we were charging users every time the created a web-app, then we’d lose all of that spontaneity.
(there’s also the cynical point that, while it feels wonderful and easy because you are using a free tool.  If you had paid a lot of money for the software and were just handed a Microsoft office template, then you would be forgiven for finding it a little bit cheap)
More to the point, our goal is that everybody has access to AAC, not that everyone has access to our AAC.  If we were focused on profit, then we would have much less motive to make the system so accessible.  In fact, our work will export to the Open Board Format.  So you will both be able to edit files for The Open Voice Factory using a handy PowerPoint template, and be able to edit your files for any device that is compatible with the Open Board Format.

Application to Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity Health Innovation Fund

Some of you may remember the truely awesome post from Kate Ganim from Superhero Cyborgs (If you didn’t you should go back and read the post).

One of my ambitions for some time has been to bring the project over to the UK and this weekend past I made the time to properly write a grant proposal to Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity Health Innovation Fund.   The proposal as written is here: GSTT Charity – HIF concept note-corrected.

As regular readers will know, making our applications public is something we believe is important in terms of transparency and engagement as we try and do it wherever possible, but there, of course, other demands on time.

Flowers for Turing 2016!

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It’s the time of year for the Flowers for Turing project!

In 2013, we thought we were going to do something small and cute.  We thought we were going to lay a few flowers at Alan Turing’s statue.

We ended up doing something that was incredibly successful and touched thousands and thoughts of people (You can read more about the project and the reaction we got on on the project website).  We got bigger in 2014, and bigger again in 2015.

Turing’s 104th Birthday – 23rd June

We’re doing it again this year. We’d like to get 104 bunches of flowers for his 104nd Birthday. We’re looking for people working in Universities/organisations/groups and we’ve also started taking pledges from individuals. Last year people paid £16.30 – £3.50 for the cost of the a bunch of flowers and the rest as a donation to SpecialEffect is a UK based charity which uses video games and technology to enhance the quality of life of people with disabilities. If we get 104 bunches of flowers, then we raise over £1,000 for SpecialEffect and that will make a big big difference.

Manchester city council have confirmed they are fine with it, and a couple of volenteers in Manchester  will help handle the set up and clean up.

How you can get involved

I’ll be doing various emails out and other ways of contacting people. But the long and short of it is, if you want to be involved, if you’d like a bunch of flowers placed at the statue in your name on the 23rd of June, then please donate here.

(Of course, if you are in Manchester, then you don’t need us, you can wander down on the day (as many people did last year) and add your own flowers, but we’d appreciate the charity donation).

 

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Chemistry Accessibility

The Royal Society of Chemistry have just put up a disability-focused report I wrote for them.    The report was interesting to research and write, and the team were smart and fun to work with. I’d like to use this post to show some good practice things that the RSC did that I’d like other large bodies or companies to start doing.

The framing

The RSC was an interesting client. They’d carried out various accessibility audits on their web platform before, and had the usual responses.

However the team knew that their (extremely extensive) educational material might be excluding some students and they made the especially interesting point that they’d like to focus their educational efforts on those students that may be excluded from classroom experiments. The RSC weren’t thinking about how to make just their site accessible for anybody, they where thinking about how to make chemistry accessible, and that matters.

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The brief

This approach moves us well beyond the normal accessibility audit territory. The report clearly needed to be in two parts – the first was examining practical chemistry education in the UK to see which students where missing out on practical experiments.

This was a fascinating parts and there was a great set of examples of disability being defined by context.  From this simple premise, open questions tumble out. Which disabilities require the most support with practical chemistry, and which ones have dramatically different support needs from their written work?  How much does this influence choice of subjects at A-level and beyond?

(as it happens most of the data on disability in education is swamped by Dyslexia and similar labels. Trying to locate, say, physical disabilities in most disability data is hard, but that’s a story for another post.)

The second part was another place where the RSCs adaptability shone though. Like everybody else they had limited money and they wanted to make sure that it was spent most effectively.  After some careful design meetings we worked out that the best approach was to make a ‘access benefit assessment’ for their site.

The point of the assessment is to replicate a traditional risk assessment of the type that any organisation carries out.  I found about 10 or 20 issues with the RSC web presence and for each one I gave a showed why it was a problem, and gave a rought number of users that would have a problem (For example, I might quote the number of visually impaired schoolchildren currently sitting GCSEs) and, crucially, how much of a problem it would be.  The RSC could then take that report to their technical team and ask them to work out how much each one would cost to fix.  When you know how many people are affected, how badly they are affected, and how much it costs to fix, it’s very easy to know how to spend your budget.

 

 

AzuleJoe development push

We’re kicking AzuleJoe development up a gear over the summer.  We’ve got a schedule to keep for the Nesta Prize we won and we also want to be able to show off cool things at ISAAC 2016.

Right now there are three major tasks to attack:

Full implementation of special commands

Currently, as you will have seen in the demo, users can write things like special::clear or special::deleteword in the link field of the PowerPoint template to give the buttons special behavior.  At the moment, only those two commands are implemented, and there are many left to do – the commands to insert different text than the label, or control external functions (like TV controls and the calculator).

One of the things that is making this more urgent is that it’s needed to completely finish off (this is why the CK20 demo wasn’t released when the CK12 one was).  It should actually be relatively simple to implement.   The major sticking point is that I need to carefully consider exactly how I’m to handle the care where a user would like to write completely arbitrary javascript….

Export to the open board format

We are big fans of the Open Board Format around here, and it’s a bit embarrassing that we haven’t put the code in to get us there.  Currently our parser takes in a PowerPoint document and produces a JSON file and some icons.  It should be trivial to extend this so that it plays nicely with the other Open Board Format tools and, from a wider perspective, it’s important to get this done before ISAAC – it will be a tricky sell to talk about the importance of portability and all the advantages of open source if we haven’t got on board with the format.

Testing Code

The third, and deeply unsexy thing we need to put in place is an automated testing core.   For the uninitiated: we need a script that runs AzuleJoe on a range of different inputs designed to test the limits of the code.  This helps us check that a new feature hasn’t broken an old one and means that we can also start doing significant rewriting of the code to make it a little more efficient and easier to maintain.

What’s next

When I started writing this post I thought that getting the special commands working was going to be the thing to tick off (because then I could call the current state of the code a stable release) and then we’d look at everything else.  However, the more I wrote, the clearer it was to me that the testing structure is going to have to happen first.  I’ve been running into more and more development problems around pageset versions working one day and failing to work another and that’s causing problems.

More to the point, without a sensible test architecture, it’s very hard for other people to work on the code well.  Now that we’ve got people using the code in Academia, it’s going to be hard to encourage them to merge changes back into the trunk without a proper test system.

So it looks like I’m going to have to finally work out how testing works in Python.   Time to go into research mode.

Update

As of 27th May, there is now regression testing for the python parts of AzuleJoe. On it’s own that’s a big relief.  I need to have a careful thing about how I want to test the javascript, but that will get me most of the way.     I was going to post my contemporary notes of the implementation, but they were mostly uninteresting when I came to review them. I should be a little careful about that in future.  The only really useful thing I can find from my notes is that this was about five hours work spread over three days.

 

Children in Need Funding.

At eQuality Time we believe that the more transparent an organisation is, the more effective it will be.

One of the things we’d like to be more transparent about is the funding application process.

We recently put up our application to Children in Need (and my thoughts on the interview) to cover costs associated with continuing the Supertitle project. Unfortunately our application for funding was unsuccessful on this occasion.

Our feedback was:

We expect all organisations and projects we fund to take active steps to protect children and make sure they come to no harm while at the project.  This means having clear and active child protection and health and safety policies and practices in place.  We recommend that you refer to the NSPCC website, paying particular attention to the ‘Are they safe?’ resource or the Core Safeguarding Standards

…and I put a lot of that down to my poor performance in the interview.  However it’s definitely an area to think about and strengthen.

We’d like to be making our applications public as a regular thing, but there are various other demands on time so it will have to be on a case by case basis.

ISACC 2016

 

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We’ve just confirmed that eQuality Time will be at ISAAC’s 2016 conference.

The International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) works to improve the lives of children and adults with communication disabilities and their conference, held every two years,  is very much the biggest event on the communication disability calendar.

It’s being held in  Toronto, Canada, from August 6 – 13, 2016, and in addition to presenting on AzuleJoe and CommuniKate, we’ll have a stall in the main hall for all four days where we will be talking about all of our disability-facing projects.  We’re really looking forward to it and if you happen to be there, do please pop over and say hello.

 

10000 Children Funding Proposal

At eQuality Time we believe that the more transparent an organisation is, the more effective it will be.

One of the things we’d like to be more transparent about is the funding application process.  A little while ago we put out a post about a new project we were putting together looking at children missing from the education system.  We put together a bid that aimed to tackle the issue and unfortunate it was denied.  Here is the bid:

Here’s the resulting  PDF: Trust for London (It’s the version before our articles and constitution were added and before proofreading so there may be errors)

The response was:

 

Dear Dr Reddington,

Further to your recent application for funding to the Trust.  The grants team has now met to discuss all the proposals submitted to the Main Grants – February 2016 funding round, and after careful consideration, I am sorry to inform you that your application has not been shortlisted to the next stage.

Given the very real demands on our funding, the Grants Team felt unable to prioritise your bid in favour of other issues which we felt had a stronger fit with our aims in relation to poverty.

I am sorry to send you this disappointing response but wish you every success with your project.

Kind regards,

 

…we asked if it was possible to get some more feedback and are waiting on the response. In the meantime we’d like to thank Trust for London for taking the time to look at the bid and we hope that by making it accessible we’ll help other organisations prepare their own bids.

We’d like to be making our applications public as a regular thing, but there are various other demands on time so it will have to be on a case by case basis.

 

Reaction to the Inclusive Prize

So we won the inclusive technology prize and it’s time to, well, react to that.

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It’s incredible on two levels.

We believe in AzuleJoe and Communikate, we believe that their time is now and that they can produce real change.  The prize publicity, and the funding that will come with it is a real validation of that belief.

This funding, and a solid project to pour ourselves into, also matters to eQuality Time.   We’re funded up to our third birthday, which is longer than I dared hope when I started to put it together. By the time that happens, we’ll have hit our grove nicely and we hope to be bringing forward a whole range of innovative projects.

There are a huge number of people to thank for us getting this far – lots of you are on our contributor’s list here, but there are many others. Thank you for believing in us.

I should at least, tell the story of the awards. Unfortunately I wasn’t there, being most of the way up a mountain in British Columbia. That was because I was in the middle of about three weeks of taking pictures like this:

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On this particular day we sat in the cafe/restaurant at the top of the mountain. My phone was refusing Wifi so I was away from email and SMS. I borrowed my other half’s phone to investigate. (Obviously she had to check Facebook first, that’s a given)

I should say thatthought we were very unlikely to win. I suspected we were in the top three or so entries, but I thought we were far behind the leader.  Still worth having a Google.

After a bit of a search on a shaky  internet connection, I found this.

…and I was faintly pleased – Cara has a great concept and is a really lovely person to talk to.  Obviously I would rather it was us – but I was pleased that it went to such a good idea.

Scrolling down a little with my poor internet.  I find this (actually it was a tweet ‘like’ this, but  said the same thing)….

Wait… what?

Swiss Cottage (who’s app I admittedly know little about) also won? Well done… obviously… but… didn’t Cara just win? There’s only one prize….

I eventually find the official Nesta tweet…

The tweet itself is unhelpful, but the photo begs the question “Kate, why are you in the middle holding a trophy?”

Eventually it became  clear: Nesta had awarded two ‘secret’  prizes of 30k and 15k for second and third place.   I’m slightly unsure how I feel about this: we thought that there was only one prize so we set out our pitch in a very high-risk-high-reward way. If I had known that there was a second and third place I would have played it far safer in the application.   On balance I’m fine with it, but I suspect that if we had come 4th I would be quite unhappy.

I may have cried a little when we found out. But only because my other half was sobbing and that stuff is contagious. I think everyone else in the mountain cafe assumed I’d proposed.

 

 

New shows for Supertitle

Two new shows have been prepared for Supertitle this week:

Eve is for medium to advanced groups who can fill in their own speaker information.

As a note – there has been some behind-the-scenes changes and groups should now be able to edit without logging in.

All episodes are available at this page – we’re looking forward to seeing what our groups can come up with!