Extending concept coding services
The WWAAC (World wide augmentative and alternative communication) project has made several Internet services accessible for persons with language and/or cognitive impairments including symbol users and the elderly. A universal coding system was designed for message encoding for use with eMail, eChat or enhancing web-page information. The services are promoted as a public standard and employ six national and three symbol languages. Further support for managing information and navigation by perspective users has also been developed. Software applications are designed with appropriate user interfaces and exhibit the message content in a variety of ways such as by text, by speech or by symbols. Furthermore, the WWAAC project has developed a prototype system that demonstrates the principles that the project is seeking to promote. At this stage it is focusing on distributing an all-inclusive ontology as well as a robust and reliable central reference server. Reference databases will be constructed and will be accessible through free service packages. This will be useful for developers, manufacturers and suppliers of augmentative and alternative communication systems who could use it as an interface to the concept code server. In this way, information interchange at the concept level could be ensured.
