A Software Environment for the Development of Component-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication Applications

As an answer to the disabled community’s Odyssey to gain access to adaptable, modular, multilingual, cheap and sustainable Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) products, we propose the use of the ITHACA framework. It is a software environment for building component-based AAC applications, grounded on the Design for All principles and a hybrid (community and commercial) Open Source development model. ITHACA addresses the developers, the integrators (e.g., vendors, facilitators, special educators), as well as people who use AAC. We introduce a new AAC product lifecycle, i.e., the design-develop-distribute procedures, from the developers’ viewpoint and the search-select-modify-maintain procedures from the integrators’ perspective. ITHACA provides programmers with a set of tools and reusable Open Source code for building AAC software components. It also facilitates AAC product integrators to put together sophisticated applications using the available on the Web, independently pre-manufactured, free or commercial software parts. Furthermore, it provides people who use AAC with a variety of compatible AAC software products which incorporate multimodal, user-tailored interfaces that can fulfill their changing needs. Several ready to use ITHACA-based components, including on-screen keyboards, Text-to-Speech, symbol selection sets, echatting, e-mailing, and scanning-based input, as well as four complete communication aids addressing different user cases have been developed. This demonstration showed good acceptance of the ITHACA applications and substantial improvement of the end users’ communication skills. Developers’ experience on working in ITHACA’s Open Source projects was also positively evaluated.