Late last year we took part in the Network Rail and GWR Connected Places Catapult. Our plan was to understand how using an AAC app (a new modified version of Scene & Heard Pro) in a busy environment would work. We had anticipated some of the challenges of using it in a station but at the end of our project we have put together a list of learnings:
Railway stations are incredibly noisy
Not only is there regular background noise, messages over loudspeakers, rattling suitcases and loads of chatter, the trains coming into and out of the station are loud that it makes conversation difficult. Using text-to-speech is also difficult and perhaps more difficult than speech against the cacophony going on.
Travelling can be stressful
We anticipated that people using our AAC app would be mostly regular AAC users, but after listening to stakeholders and discussing it further we identified that the potentially stressful situations involved in travelling (rail replacement buses, platform changes, delays, ticketing confusion) can mean that for some people speaking becomes more challenging, and the use of AAC may be suitable or helpful in these scenarios.
Vocabulary selection is both predictable and unpredictable
While many of the station staff were able to tell us the most common questions asked at teh station (eg where is my platform?, where is the airport bus?, where is the bathroom?) there are also numeous questions that you can't pre-programme into your AAC app ahead of time given the unpredictability of travel such as delays.
This lead us to some simple recommendations for future AAC development:
augment text-to-speech with visual supports such as displaying hte message on the screen for the communication partner
provide opportunities for adding in content before you travel, and also to enter novel utterances easily as you travel
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