The home grid

The Voco Chat home grid is made up of 12 communication cells, alongside a functions column, chat writing area and a jump to My toolkit.

The top row of the home grid contains a jump to My toolkit where you’ll find lots of useful resources for supporting communication and emotional wellbeing, as well as apps to support interaction and engagement.

The large white cell next to this is your Chat writing area. As you build a message it will appear here. Select the chat writing area to speak your full message.

Below the top row are twelve cells to use for communication, grouped into three areas.

The six cells on the left hand side are your Message Pathways. These are designed to help you start to build your message, based on why you are communicating. For example, to tell someone something is wrong, to ask someone something, or give an opinion about something.

The orange Quick Communication cells in the next column contain additional vocabulary, including useful words like ‘more’, ‘stop’ and ‘finished’, handy phrases for having a conversation, and space to add your own favourite phrases.

The blue Everyday Words cells in the fourth column are where you will find a lot of useful vocabulary such as people’s names, places and categorised vocabulary for a whole range of other topics. You will find jumps to many of these words from within the six message pathways, but can also get directly to the words using these jumps.

The grey Functions column on the right hand side of the screen is where you’ll find options to jump back to the previous grid, delete words, and clear your chat writing area.

If you use an alternative access method such as eye gaze or head pointing, and dwell to select, you will also see a Rest cell at the top of this column which you can use to pause your access method. This function column is present on every grid in Voco Chat.