Scanning in Snap Core First

By Elizabeth Bahr

Elizabeth is a member of the Clinical Team at Tobii Dynavox.

As a speech therapist working with clients who use AAC, you can’t help but become an advocate for them. You know the stakes are high and you want to give them more opportunities to improve their interactions with the world around them. For me, the days I got to work with clients who used scanning were some of my favorite days.

Generally, if you need to use scanning as your AAC access method you have significant motor impairments, maybe some vision issues, and little to no intelligible speech. That means helping an individual identify a switch site (or sites) and learning how to utilize switch scanning not only can improve communication, but life in general. 

Now, as a clinical team member at Tobii Dynavox, I’ve learned a lot about the ‘science’ behind scanning. Scanning as an access method can be difficult, but developing a product that scans well for everyone is also quite difficult. Below are a few challenges we faced when creating the new Core First Scanning Page Set in Snap Core First and how we addressed them:

• Every individual who uses scanning is distinct and requires different settings. However, once you start customizing settings in software, two things occur: your system is no longer simple and technical issues are bound to happen. To combat this issue in the new Core First Scanning Page Set, we utilized user-testing and feedback from experts to sequence content, create default settings, and choose vocabulary that will work for ‘most’. 
• We know you are still going to personalize your settings and content. And honestly, you should! To help do this, we made it easy to move scan groups around, swap buttons, and delete things you don’t need. 

If you haven’t already, please check out the new Core First Scanning Page Set in Snap Core First and make sure to visit our website for additional training resources. We also appreciate customer feedback, especially when it comes to all the needs scanners may have.

If you would like to share any feedback with us, please contact us here.