H is 20 years old and in his third year at Beaumont college. He is an avid fan of
Huddersfield Town and loves music, especially Coldplay. H has Cerebral Palsy and a cortical visual impairment.
He is keen to use IT, but in the past has always needed support whilst accessing the internet or email. We were keen to give H a solution which would enable him to access IT independently. This was a challenge because this would need to be switch operated and navigation would need to be via auditory feedback only.
H told us that he was most interested in access to the internet, email, texting, environmental controls and music.
Initial assessments with H were done using a Powerbox running The Grid 2. We created some simple grids to see if H would be able to make selections with a switch using auditory feedback. We used a „drinks‟ page and a „sounds and music‟ page. It was quickly obvious that H had the ability to make good use of such a device, and that he would be able to navigate by selecting a category and then making a choice

within that category. We also discovered that he was very motivated by music
– we couldn‟t keep him away from the Coldplay button!
Although a Powerbox would have been a perfectly suitable solution, it would have been costly. As H would not be using the screen or the keyboard on the device, this enabled us to look at much smaller and cheaper options than we would normally consider. We identified the „Fizzbook Spin‟ netbook as being suitable. This device is small, light, has a rotating touchscreen, and is very low cost. The built in speakers are not powerful enough for the level of auditory feedback required though, so we added a USB Backbox which has a more powerful speaker and switch inputs.
We considered a range of options for mounting the Fizzbook on H ‟s wheelchair. We initially planned to use a lightweight pole mount to place the device at the side of the chair. We were then going to use a Perspex plate fixed to the back of the Fizzbook, which would attach to a mounting plate. However, we concluded that as H did not need the screen in front of him there was a better and cheaper mounting method.
We placed the device on a shelf behind his chair, and velcroed the backbox containing the speaker on to the side of the seat close to H ‟s head. In this position the device is discrete and protected. Staff can still access it reasonably easily, and

all that H needs to concern himself with are his switch (on his headrest) and the speaker.
One initial problem with this mounting solution was that some support staff saw it as being complicated and were reluctant to set it up in case they got something wrong.
In reality there is only one extra step involved in the setup compared to a normal communication aid – the backbox needs to be plugged in to the USB and headphone sockets of the Fizzbook and fixed to the side of the chair. Therefore we created a clear „How To‟ guide and conducted area staff training to communicate this.
H was very keen to access the internet. We looked at using screen reading software, as well as the screen reader built into The Grid 2. However, the combination of a screen reader and switch access presented a challenge. If using a mouse it is possible to move the pointer around the screen until the relevant information is read out by the software. Although it is possible to control the pointer using a mouse control grid, it is necessary to be able to see the screen to do this.
Another option is for The Grid to scan across all the links in the page, using auditory feedback. This would be fine for simple web pages, but many sites have a large number of links across the top or down the side of the page which have to be scanned through before getting to the main body of text.
We came up with idea of using RSS feeds as they are short and contain only the title and content of each story. We were then able to build a custom made web page for
H which is very simple to navigate:

The advantage of this approach is that the content of the page is provided by the
RSS feed provider (for example BBC News), but the design of the page is done by the Beaumont team. We started off with an RSS feed containing news about
Coldplay, and one containing football news from BBC Sport. We have since added feeds for some of H‟s friends on Facebook.
The system is the best we can come up with at the present time. There are some drawbacks – one is that some RSS feeds are more suitable than others. The BBC
Sport feed is ideal as it contains a headline, and then a sentence or two of content for each story. The Coldplay feed however only contains the headline, which often does not provide enough meaningful information. Also, the stories can only be accessed by stepping through one at a time which can be time consuming. The choice of RSS feeds is also limited – so for example we were unable to find one that is exclusively about Huddersfield Town.
A future possibility is using web content that has been optimised for display on a mobile phone which is simpler than a fully fledged web page.
Email has proved to be the most difficult application for us to design and for H to master. Creating a workflow for sending an mail which in intuitive and simple using only auditory feedback has been much more difficult than we expected.
We have been continually refining the process by splitting it into bite size chunks, making the auditory cues as clear and concise as possible, moving the most used functions to the beginning etc etc.
This process has been informed by H ‟s struggles with the grids – one example of this was with the stage between composing the email and then choosing the contacts to send it to. On the composition page we had a button labelled „Send‟ which linked to the contacts page. We found that H was reluctant to click this button - when we discussed this with him it became clear that he didn‟t want to click Send because he hadn‟t yet selected who he was sending it to! We relabelled the button as „choose contacts‟ and all was well.
We now also always test the grids thoroughly ourselves with our eyes closed.
Before we started doing this we thought that we were only paying attention to the auditory cues during testing, but the fact that we could subconsciously glance at the screen meant that this was not the case!
For H, learning the email grids is still an ongoing process and sometimes a source of frustration for him. He can send an email with some support now, but still sometimes becomes disorientated about where he is up to in the process and needs some prompting.

There are also a couple of other technical difficulties to overcome. For example when incoming emails are read out they often have a lot extraneous information in long winded headers and footers, especially if it has been forwarded. For example there may well be a whole line of hyphens to separate content – the Grid 2 reads out them all out one by one! This is fine if it is at the end of the message (we‟ve included a „Stop Speaking‟ button!) but if it is at the beginning there is no real way round this.
In our initial assessments with H we used a standard music player grid. However, we found a problem with this. When selected a track The Grid can be set to scan up or down the list one at time, reading out the track names. However, if it reaches the top or bottom of the list it stops – we really needed it to keep going ie when it reaches the top continue from the bottom. As H could not see what was happening when the scan stopped it was confusing for him. We therefore set up music pages where each track is on a separate button. This works well, but the drawbacks are that it is time consuming to create, the tracks are embedded in the user‟s Grid
Bundle making a huge file, and that once the track is playing it is difficult to stop!
Now that H is more familiar with the device we are hopeful that he will be able to master the standard music player grid. With this the content is generated automatically and the music files are stored separately.

We have created a grid which allows H to select TV or radio channels via Freeview from his wheeltop. This works very well, and has been straightforward for H to learn.
H has a grid which gives him access to Internet Radio stations. We did this by using
The Grid to open up Windows Media Player and play the relevant audio stream. H is particularly impressed that he is able to listen to „Coast FM‟ which is his local radio station in North Wales. He kept asking “how did you do that???”. This is relatively

easy for H to navigate, but there are a couple of minor problems. For it to work reliably, it is necessary to always click the „Stop Radio‟ button before changing stations – which is fine as long as you remember! Occasionally the audio stream doesn‟t open in Media Player and we have no way of creating an auditory error message for this.

More staff training

Continue to work on email with H

Reintroduce full music player grid

Liaise with Sensory Software re Grid notification messages

Investigate options to introduce more web content

Introduce SMS?