Figure 1. Main Screen
really is quite arbitrary, however, we were able to group like visual and auditory information to make the name of the color relevant. For example, ‘yellow row’ indicated words or picture symbols re- ferring to people. See Figures 1 and 2. A learner could certainly memorize locations of all the words within their device without them being arranged as we did, how- ever, this becomes much like memorizing a route to the nearby coffee shop without being able to use an sensory information. Memorizing three blocks forward and two blocks right gets you to the coffee shop works, until the walker forgets or loses track of where in their motor pattern they are (perhaps because of a mis- step due to body incoordination or developing, but not mastered scanning automaticity). There is no useful information in under- standing the context of where that person is in relation to a whole system, and therefore their entire learning process is based only on rote memory, instead of also understanding context. Much more comprehensive and contextual is understanding that the coffee shop is three blocks in front of my house and I turn right at the green house, with the willow tree. If my motor pattern is interrupted, I still have relevant contextual information that will get me to the coffee shop. We wanted Douglas to be able to understand the context of where he was within his language system, so he did not need to know every location and motor pattern of every word in his lan-
guage system in order to use it to find words he had not yet been shown, modeled or practiced. He could understand how patterns got him to words and where he may look for new words, much like a person using direct selection understands they when they are looking in the Unity® icon of a rainbow, they see the colors of the rainbow and are given a hint that that is where colors might live; and that we often pair colors with art, so words about art may live there as well. This information allows the user to make informed guesses on where a word they have not used before is. This was especially important for Douglas, as he was at risk for his motor execution going awry, due to the complexity of his body. We accommodated for the visual and auditory needs in Doug- las’ system with auditory row and column (icon) prompts. Row prompts were a somewhat arbitrary color (button/symbol back- ground of icons in said row) that described the color of the given row with like information contained in the row. The patterns are two-fold, as information on the main screen could not be sorted in the same ways. Throughout the system (with the exception of customized fringe vocabulary pages), the rows were sorted “ac- tivity” or “quick row,”“yellow row,”“green row,”“blue row,”“orange row,” with the colors representing parts of speech or word func- tions (See Figures 1 and 2). Yellow = people words. Green = action words. Blue = phrases. Orange = describing words; and the activi- ty rows containing fringe vocabulary (mostly nouns).
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