Our identities are important to us at AssistiveWare, and we believe they are just as important to the AAC users we serve. AssistiveWare has a long history of working to represent all our users:

  • As early as 2011, we broke the tradition of children speaking with adult voices by working with our partners to create children’s voices for a range of languages and regions.
  • Last year we added support for choosing the user’s preferred skin tone for all people symbols in both Proloquo2Go and simPODD.
  • We have symbols that cover the basics of a range of religions, and people can easily add more specific vocabulary if needed.
  • AssistiveWare is among the partners that joined Acapela Group, extensively collaborating with the African American AAC community to create the first African American English digital voice designed for AAC.

We want to continue serving our users and communities in all the ways they identify, so for Proloquo2Go version 7.5, we took the chance to put diversity center stage and rolled out the following updates:

New gender-neutral pronoun symbol

A symbol for ‘they,’ ‘ze,’ ‘xe,’ ‘ey,’ ‘per’ has been added and can now be used whenever a user wants to indicate a neutral gender pronoun.

Full grammar support for gender-neutral pronoun inflections

If a user adds a gender-neutral pronoun to the vocabulary, the inflections are also shown correctly. Proloquo2Go 7.5 will support this in all languages (English, Spanish, French, Dutch)

Female superheroes - assemble!

Female superheroes have landed in Proloquo2Go! Celebrating female superpower, we present a new set of symbols designed to allow our users to discuss and identify with their favorite shero.

We have also listened to your feedback and made a couple of usability improvements:

Facebook sharing of user-created messages

After some development work, we brought back Facebook sharing, allowing our users to express themselves on the largest social media network.

Additional button actions: delete last entry, undo clear message

An improvement for our users with motor issues who sometimes delete the last message rather than the last word. To delete the last entry:

Go to Edit mode > Create a button > Actions > Add Action > Delete Last Entry

If a button with this action is selected, it works the same as the ‘delete’ button but will not clear the whole message window.

The button for this action is only active when something is added to the message window.

There is now a way for users with motor issues to get back a message that has been accidentally deleted. To undo clear message:

Go to Edit mode > Create a button > Actions > Add Action > Undo Clear Message

If a button with this action is selected, it will restore the cleared message to the message window. The button with this action is active after the message window has been cleared until a new word has been added to the message window.

We hope you like the updates in Proloquo2Go 7.5!