Putting together a presentation is hard for anyone. For some people it comes easily and for other people it comes harder. But as an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) user, the way I write may be different from how other AAC users write. I created a system that is adapted to my disability and works great for me and my editor.

I write all my talks on my PC. Some AAC users might use their device to write, but for me it’s easier to write on my PC. I’m a Linux user so I use OpenOffice for my word processor. I have an editor who looks over what I’ve written, checks my grammar and spelling, and cleans up each of the many drafts as I go. Although it is my own words as much as possible, it is always my own thoughts. Then when I am close to being done, my editor will ask me if I meant to say this or that, or he’ll suggest more things to put in, or rearrange things for better flow – with my permission of course. My editor likes to keep some of my strange grammar or word or phrase usage in the final version because he thinks it better reflects my unique “dialect” or accent. So when something sounds a little strange, it’s usually because we left it that way on purpose.

Since we have a home computer network with a file server, that’s where I save my files. My editor can see what I wrote from his PC, I give him file permissions so he can edit my work over the network, and we go back and forth that way. For instance, if I add things to a talk or this blog, he can look at what I wrote from his PC, or if he changes some things then I can look at it from my PC, because we both have access to the file server from our own PCs. And we use Instant Messenger to talk back and forth while I write my talk or we edit because we are in different rooms.

Then for a talk or a presentation, I put the final file on my Vmax.  I also print out a copy of the file for my editor to mark up. Then I play it to see how it sounds and my editor notes any changes we want to make as he listens to the presentation. We want to make sure it sounds as natural as possible when spoken. That’s because it sounds different on a device than if someone speaks it. To get it right we usually have to work on changing punctuation, and sometimes we have to misspell words or replace them with better sounding words or phrases. For example, the word “and” has to be changed in some places to “andd”. I usually have to add more commas and periods in some places. One trick we have discovered is to put two commas in places, to ensure that the device pauses long enough where it should.

I discovered that the Vmax is sensitive to the kind of file types it can import for speaking so I use Open Office and save the document as a Text Encoded file.   Sometimes the device doesn’t say words correctly, and I have to work around the particular speech synthesizer’s quirks.  For instance, the word “blog”. Either you have to capitalize the “B” or you have to go into the punctuation exceptions and misspell it in lower case as “bhlog”. With some words the device spells the words instead of saying them so we try capitalizing the first letter of a word to get the device to at least try to pronounce it.

Those are just some of the tricks we use to get the presentation to sound right. We do this “Listen and Change” process as many as ten times or more to get it to sound right. I look at the printed copy of the file my editor has marked up during the listening session and I put those corrections back into my copy in the word processor on my PC and the file server, and then I copy that corrected version back to the Vmax. It sounds complicated, but it is easier for me to do it that way.

After I have my file finished and loaded, I present it using a special page I made just for talks or presentations. On it I have a big button to speak either a sentence or a paragraph at a time. It’s very large so I don’t have to look at my device instead of looking at the audience. And I also have fourteen other medium-sized buttons for editing and other uses, such as to go back to a previous paragraph, or go forward to a next paragraph or moving between words and lines. I have a link button to go back to my main keyboard page just to fix a word if we are listening to my talk. I have a button to load my talks from files. I have a button that says “Hi, can everyone hear me ok?” and another that says “Please have your questions ready, I will answer them when I am done with my talk.” And another that says “If you cannot understand my device, please feel free to interrupt me, so I can repeat it.”

With someone with developmental and cognitive disabilities like me, we often have a very hard time with grammar and punctuation rules. And there are other challenges: I still don’t get or understand some things, which means someone might have to explain something I don’t understand, in terms that I can understand. In the same way, sometimes I also have a difficult time getting what I’m thinking down into what I want to write. It’s like my brain uses a different language. I know what I am thinking, but I have to translate that into words that the world can understand. At those times, my editor has to ask me what I meant and then I have to think about it, and it might take a minute or it could take me weeks to explain it in my own words.

The system I use for writing works to help me overcome some of the ways being developmentally and cognitively disabled affects my thought processes. Some people don’t know the extent of my disabilities because of how I have learned to adapt to my disabilities, so they treat me as normal, which they should. But hopefully, if they get to know me long enough, they should start to notice that I am not “normal” and they also will adapt to my cognitive delays when they interact with me, and take me as I am.