iPad for Ataxians?

The iPad has now been released in US and will be in UK at the end of May. Despite all the media hype you may be interested to learn of some features and apps that would be particularly useful for some Ataxians.

It has built in Screenreader which in itself can be an expensive product to buy for a computer costing a couple of hundred pounds. It also has a zoom feature to make pages easier to read and also to make smaller links etc bigger and easier to click on.

You can zoom up to 5 times the normal size and move

left, right, up or down to view any

portion of the screen close up.

If you like reading books it has an iBookstore where you can download books. The built in screenreader can read them to you if you have sight impairments or you can use the zoom.

It gives you a large interactive calender which can be useful if you need reminders setting to take medication or do other things or just would like a personal organiser type device but struggle with small devices.

Of course you can use it simply as an iPod Touch as to download music, films and apps.

For Ataxians with speech difficulties who may have problems with a few people not understanding them and who may just need a few sentences writing down for asking for things in the shop, 'Speak it' is a very simple and basic text-to-speech program that will speak whatever you type on the qwerty keyboard.

Speak it on ipad shows saved phrases

If you have little or no intelligible speech you might need something more substantial with a proper vocabulary for building words and sentence.

Proloquo2go is a full AAC solution, it costs more than other apps but even with cost of an iPad plus this app it is substantially cheaper than its equivalent in touchscreen communications like Dynavox which cost around £4,000 for a 5"screen device, £5,000 plus for larger tablet sized machines.

Although most screenshots shown of Proloquo2go feature symbols on them I contacted the person who designed the app and he sent me screenshots showing text only.

Don't panic if you are not a fan of pink, you can choose for all words and categories to be simply outlined in black. The screenshot above shows an 8 x 8 grid this just refers to the area visible at one time as the iPad has a scrollable screen you can just scroll down to select any words not showing, this is useful if you need larger buttons like this.

If you wanted to be really creative and have time to play around on it you could have all categories showing symbols so you know its a button leading to another page and have the vocab within that page as words only as above. This would be particuarly useful if you had smaller buttons and needed buttons that lead to another category within a category.

For example say you wanted to create a category called 'shopping' this would lead to a list of items, now to save you doing a lot of programming from scratch P2G allows you to copy vocab from other pages.. for example the food page... you would copy your favourite foods and simply paste them into your new category as text same as above.

Then say you occasionally go for clothes but not as often so you just copy the button that leads to clothing and put it on the same page. you may want to remind yourself that this button wont say the word 'clothes' but will open the page listing items of clothing, so you might choose to add a picture to that button instead.

Another use of adding symbols to some buttons, maybe if you want to add some complete sentences but don't want bigger buttons to see the whole sentence.. like for example an explanation of Ataxia you might just want to add a pic to remind you what the sentence is about (a wheelchair icon, pic of other walking aids or balance scales).

You can also take actual pictures (with separate camera) and add them to the iPad via either the camera connection kit or by copying a file of your photo's into iTunes and it will copy across when you sync your device.

Say for example you have a dog, you may want a pic of your dogs face on the button that leads to all vocabulary to do with your dog, you might choose to add individual words so you can build sentences or just one button for a full sentence eg pic of dog bowl on button may say 'can you feed the dog please'

Another useful thing to use an iPad for is if you have difficulty with tiny buttons on remote controls you can turn it into a jumbo touchscreen IR remote via an App such as 'Mini Red Eye'.

You just plug this little dongle into your headphone socket.