Are you using visual scene displays (VSD) within your AAC toolkit? There are many reasons you should include VSDs, like Scene & Heard, in your evaluation arsenal, not least because it offers a quick-fire way to get going with creating personal content for your client. Today's blog covers some top tips on getting the best VSDs:
Use Apple's own photo editing tools to get your photos optimised for your VSD. After you take a photo or video, use the tools in the Photos app to edit it. You can adjust the light and colour, crop, rotate, add a filter, and more. If you don’t like how your changes look, tap Cancel to revert back to the original. Here are all the ways you can edit your photo in Photos on the iPad, including filters.
Remember, it's key to include familiar people in VSDs wherever possible. That means reducing the use of generic or photo library type images. If you do need to use photo library images, it's worth bearing in mind the findings from this study, which showed that people preferred scenes involving people that shared similar characteristics to the users.
You can always go back and add new hotspots on VSDs. In Scene & Heard, you can then go back and add more spoken messages, or link to other scenes. To see how to do that, this guide is super useful on YouTube.
You can create VSDs with recorded messages in ANY language! As long as you have a speaker of the required language available to record the message you are fine! That means that VSDs like Scene & Heard are a great way to set up AAC quickly in environments like ICU, emergency departments or in classrooms and kindergartens.
