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Writer's pictureRebecca Bright

Visual Scene Displays and Aphasia

One of the common ways of presenting visual scene displays for people with aphasia is to set up conversational phrases and questions around the photo in the visual scene display. A lot of the research from David Beukelman presented the visual scenes with a bank of topical phrases, relevant people's photos and conversational questions situated to the side of, or under, a single photo or sometimes a couple of photos. In Scene & Heard Pro, we primarily focus on how the photo is used with hotspots that carry the phrases or questions, but there are two great ways you can do that using photo visual scenes in the app.


1. You can use one of the features in the advanced editing of hotspots to create labels, which can be used in this way. In this example, I have a lovely space to the left of the photo where I can stack four phrases/questions relevant to my visual scene photo.


2. I can also do this by using my grid layouts. Here, I have set up a 2 x 2 grid, used the same photo in the first cell, used the remaining three cells to display phrases or questions, and used symbols from the Scene & Heard Pro symbol library to support the text.


Adding phrases to a video visual scene would also be possible. You can add each phrase or question within the video as a scene on the video, with the benefit of the temporal nudging that presenting the phrase/question at the right time might provide!


Our YouTube channel for Scene & Heard Pro has several videos to watch on how to create photo visual scenes, as well as grids and video visual scenes. Key reference

Beukelman, David R.; Hux, Karen; Dietz, Aimee R.; McKelvey, Miechelle L.; and Weissling, Kristy S.E., "Using Visual Scene Displays as Communication Support Options for People with Chronic, Severe Aphasia: A Summary of AAC Research and Future Research Directions" (2015). Special Education and Communication Disorders Faculty Publications. 151. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/specedfacpub/151



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