A Voting System for AAC Symbol Acceptance

This paper aims to illustrate how an innovative voting system has been developed to allow AAC users, their therapists, carers and families show their degree of acceptance for newly developed symbols and their referents. The approach, taking a participatory model of research, occurs via an online symbol management system using a set of criteria that provide instant feedback to the developers and the project team. Scores and comments regarding the symbols are collated and where a majority vote has occurred, symbols are added to the Arabic Symbol Dictionary with lexical entries in both Arabic and English