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My name is Natalie. I have cerebral palsy. When I was 2 years old I started to go to George Hastwell Special School. My Mum and Dad, Teacher, the Head teacher and the Speech and Language Therapist at school wanted me to be able to communicate but I could not talk or control the movement of my hands or arms.

Nat at 2 years old

They found out I could use my eyes so showed me how to use photographs and then Bliss symbols through eye pointing on an e tran frame and on communication boards.

Bliss Symbols

Etran frame

Then my speech therapist went to a Mardis conference and saw the ORAC communication aid, she told the head teacher about it and he

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bought one for the school to use, it was meant to be shared by quite a few people but before long I was the main person using it. To start with I used the ORAC by pressing a switch with my hand. This was very hard for me but did give me a way to use the ORAC.

ORAC Communication Aid

First I used it to play with, playing games and music. My first overlay had sound effects on, my favourite was a chicken, and it made me giggle a lot. My first overlay to help me ask for things had eight things on it, this had to be changed very quickly as drink was in the top left hand corner and as this was the first thing scanned I often hit it by mistake and ended up having a lot of drinks!

Mardis got in touch with George Hastwell School looking for someone to put on their brochure. They wanted to look at a few of the children who used the ORAC to find someone for their picture. The head teacher said they would be bound to choose me but they wanted to look. Anyway they did choose me so I was on their brochure for quite a few years. Someone came and took a photograph of me then they had it painted, I have the painting up in my house!

When I was 5, I went to Vickerstown Primary school. By this time I was using 16 squares on my ORAC. My ORAC was used in levels but as it used a paper overlay someone had to change this for me. A year later I started to use 32 squares with row and column scanning. This made switching a bit quicker for me but it was still hard. I also started to use colour and shape encoding with my eye pointing charts.

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This is me at Vickerstown Primary School

When I was 7 the ACE centre came to assess me, they suggested I try using my knees to switch with. This was much easier. I was more accurate and it was less hard work. To start with I used 1 knee switch so I still had to get my timing right. After a year I used 2 switches, one to move the scan and the other to select. Now I am back to using just one switch as it is easier for me and I can do the timing very well.

Switches

When I first got my ORAC it only worked with digital speech, soon they brought out an update which included synthetic speech. This meant I had my own voice rather than someone recorded, it also meant I could begin to use spelling with word prediction. I started using Ora talk which was really quite robotic but when I was young I accepted this as my

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voice and so did my friends, when I got a bit older I got Dectalk which sounded a better.

Initially we had not mounted my ORAC. When we tried to arrange this we had a few problems. Because I was small and light and my chair was light as well wheelchair services were worried that putting a communication aid on my chair would tip it up. We had a few discussions about this and in the end the manager of Mardis came to a meeting, his idea was that because I was not using the ordinary foot plate brackets on my chair, I had a different arrangement, we could use one of them to mount the ORAC. Because it was mounted low down this stopped my chair tipping so I was then able to have the ORAC with me all the time.

Mounting

To start with I had been mainly using my ORAC to play with, do my school work, answer questions, and ask for things, I did not really use it for spontaneous communication. This changed when my parents took me to Euro Disney for a holiday. When I came back I was desperate to tell people all I had done and seen and so started to use my ORAC to tell everyone about my holiday. Now I use my communication aid to talk all the time so my parents did not know what they started by taking me to Euro Disney! About the same time as this holiday I decided I did not want to use symbols anymore. I wanted my overlays to have just words on. By now I was also able to change the levels on my ORAC myself. I still needed the overlay changing for me but often I could move between the levels and knew what was on the buttons without the overlay anyway. My Speech and Language Therapist thought I must have some sort of internal map of my overlays in my head.

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By now the ORAC photograph was four years old and they wanted a more up to date one. They came to school to take one. They wanted me to be using my ORAC, I had been working in class on water and the sentence I used when they were taking the photograph was “We use water to flush the toilet”, it was a very funny photography sessions.

My next challenge was using a power chair. Ideally we wanted me to be able to use my ORAC at the same time as driving my chair. Again there were problems with mounting and also working out how I could use my switches to control the chair. I have used different combinations of switches to do this over the years including using switches with my knees and my head.

By the time I was 9, I was using 128 squares on my ORAC. I was mainly spelling but had different levels for some subjects. This did mean that I potentially needed the overlays changing for me although I was generally still managing to remember what was where on each level. As I would be starting secondary school in two years and by this time my ORAC was getting a bit elderly my parents began to look for a new communication aid for me. They felt that a dynamic screen device would solve the problem of overlays. We looked at a number of different devices, I preferred a text based system with word prediction. I also needed to be able to record my work and it was felt that it would be easier if the software for this was available on the same device I was using for communication. With my access difficulties this made sense as it meant I would not have to get used to two systems. Eventually I got a Cameleon. No one locally had worked with one before so it was a bit of a challenge. With the ORAC everyone had been able to learn about it gradually as I needed new features especially as it was a new device and new developments tended to come out just as I needed them. With the Cameleon I had to use it in a quite sophisticated way straight away. Luckily my Mum got very good at it and often programmed things for

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school for me; my Dad was good at the technical side of things and sometimes came out of work to sort problems.

When I was 11 I transferred to Walney Comprehensive School. As well as the Cameleon I also got some other software including Clicker. I used this for quite a lot of my school work. I did well at Secondary and got 2 GCSEs, a C in Food Technology and a D in Science. I also enjoyed learning languages including French, German and Spanish.

After school I went to a residential college quite a long way from home, this did not work out so I came home and went instead to Beaumont College. This worked well. At Beaumont I did a vocational studies course, music, art and performance. I did a lot of computer work I helped produce their newsletter once I term with news about what was happening at college. We also made staff badges. While I was at Beaumont I had a new Cameleon but this was a bit unreliable and kept breaking down which was very frustrating. I became involved in Beaumont’s Wheeltop project and Beaumont provided my with the Grid 2 based device I am using now.

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I use it for all my communication including e mails and texting and for playing my music; I also go on the internet with it. This device is now becoming old and unreliable so I have been looking at new communication aids. As part of this process I tried eye gaze but this did not work for me so I will continue to use my knees. I have chosen a My Tobii C12 and am just waiting to hear about funding.

I think one of the things that has helped me is that I started to use AAC very early and my parents encouraged me to join in with whatever was going on. I learnt to use my ORAC to a certain extent before I went to mainstream primary school so I could concentrate on what I needed to learn at school rather than doing too much to learn my communication system, although there was still a lot of work on that over the years. I was also a guinea pig as I was the first person in my local area using a communication aid in mainstream school. At the time I was also one of the youngest people to have a complex voice output communication aid.