Tactile Communication Board Speaks the Truth

I worked in training people to use AAC devices a relatively long time ago. Nowadays it’s generally handled with ipad/tablet apps. This is interesting because there is tactile feedback, which was true for most of the purpose built devices prior to cheap and very functional tablets all over the place

Before that though? It was crazy. The devices were cumbersome, really hard to use, and a pain to program. They were all over the place too; sometimes custom hardware, sometimes repurposed hardware, but even from the same company you’d see wildly different options.

A popular one was basically a windows ce computer (like a cash register) with a big lead acid battery like from a ups, all strapped into a metal box. This was popular because it was the most powerful and customizable but it was tremendously expensive (think like 10-12k) and super heavy. But these were meant to travel around with the learner and set up on a table, allowing for broad speech including building sentences

there were also some smaller more portable ones too. Still crazy expensive but less so (like 7k) and were palm pilots in big cases. Much lighter but far less powerful and more akin to what’s pictured here, a few pages of icons where the learner could indicate single words or short phrases but couldn’t build sentences. Eg the former could have icons for words and a board to allow the learner to construct the sentence “I want some pancakes please” then make it speak, whereas these would have a button for pancakes and when pressed would say “pancakes”. They were programmable though, you could use the former to just have an icon board and you could make the latter’s pancake button say a full sentence

There were also text to speech devices for learners that had more intellectual capability and could learn to type/read/write. These were just keyboards with a little screen, you’d type a sentence, and it would speak it back in a 1990s synth computer voice. Also expensive, comparable to the palm pilots but a bit less (like 5k iirc)

But the worst parts (aside from the obnoxious “medical device” pricing) were the software and support. The software was buggy garbage. These were always niche devices and the development teams were likely small and not very good. It was cumbersome and time consuming to program in the icon board, it would crash all the time, and the ui/ux was an absolute eyesore. Also the battery life was pretty terrible on most of them

The support was even worse. The device would break and they would repair it but this would often take weeks. We had several extras for commonly used devices to get around this but with some of the less used devices we didn’t. They would not forward you a loaner device or have any way of sending a replacement while you shipped the broken one back to be refurbished and resold or whatever. So the learner would essentially lose their primary (sometimes only if they didn’t know any asl) method of communication for weeks. We would go back to the books of paper icons but this is a different skill set and not every learner could quickly adjust to such a change. And this would often lead to regression in their ability to use the device

The iPad and android tablets were game changers. For $500 you had the device, and for another $2-300 you had better software that was still ugly and buggy but was regularly and easily updated (to update the other devices you’d often have to send them back as they usually had no connectivity to save battery life and limit the possibility of damage). I’m sure now, 10+ years later, the tablet software has evolved and isn’t just horrible ux and bugs (at least I hope so, looking at proloquo2go on the app store shows the same ugly ui but reviews are good so hopefully they fixed the workflows to program and improved stability). when they broke you could just pop over to the apple store and get it fixed, or for rural clients you could usually set up a repair and get a replacement device forwarded to you to limit downtime. Now when it broke it was maybe a few days to get a replacement up and running, and sometimes same day with the apple store.

I was so happy to see the old devices die

Immediately reminds me of Idiocracy