“See a need, fill a need!” – Mr Bigweld, Robots 2005.

Our Senior AT Consultant, Andrew Simpson has many clients who are approaching those tumultuous teenage years. Do you remember the awkwardness, the weird body changes and the ever increasing desire to fit in?

Now imagine going through all that and being non-verbal!

Specifically, Andrew has many female clients who are approaching or have begun their periods and he noticed that there was a real need for his clients to be able to discuss sensitive information regarding periods and there wasn’t anything available with communication aid software that provided the vocabulary or pre-made sentences for our clients to use, or even edit to make it bespoke to their needs.

After having some conversations with clients’ parents, it was clear there was a real need for something to help non-verbal females communicate their periods.

Andrew tasked Josie, the AT Assistant with creating a grid set that included everything you could possible talk about regarding periods. With the added bonus of the grid set being completely customisable. The style can be changed to suit the tastes of the user, and there are lots of spare cells to add your own specific symptoms, needs or comforts.

We made sure we considered the needs of our clients when creating this grid set. If you have a look at the image above, you will see we added the option to speak quietly, or to stop speaking altogether, in case the client didn’t want to discuss their period in front of someone, or have their communication device shouting out something they didn’t want the entire room hearing!
We also included quick fire sentences to make it easier for the user to quickly say something, which is helpful if it is a time sensitive issue or they are feeling too uncomfortable to create a sentence themselves.
As you can see in the image above, each page has lots of options but also lots of space to add your own.

We welcome any ideas from other professionals and clients to improve this grid set and we will be making it available for everyone on the Grid 3 to download and edit it to suit their needs.