alternative access – Jane Farrall Consulting

Writing Tools: Download or Customise!

Dec 11, 20252 Comments

Every year, I find I spend time creating custom resources for different writers I am privileged to work with. I truly believe that every writer has an appropriate writing tool – and sometimes we just need to spend time figuring out what that tool might be. It’s really important that the writing tool minimises the

Tools for Writing 2024 Style: A suggestion and selection guide

Jun 22, 20241 Comment

Learning to write can be really challenging – and teaching it can be really challenging too! When I started implementing Comprehensive Literacy Instruction, it was the area that I struggled most to implement. Some of the students I was working with weren’t able to hold a traditional pen or pencil – and some of them

Flip Charts – An important Emergent Writing Tool

Oct 30, 20224 Comments

A long time ago, I learned about flip charts for emergent writers, thanks to Karen Erickson and David Koppenhaver. Writing flip charts were first developed by Gretchen Hanser and staff at the Centre for Literacy and Disability Studies Flip charts as a writing tool appealed to me for a lot of reasons. Firstly, because I

Writing with All Tools Continuum: A writing continuum for all people using all writing tools

Sep 6, 202212 Comments

This blog post has been over a year in the making. It started as a result of the work I do with multiple schools and teaching literacy in AAC. Assessment is an important component of our literacy teaching – and writing assessment, as I have said many times, is a really important piece to help

AGOSCI 2017 Presentations

May 18, 20172 Comments

Today I went to one of my very happy places – an AGOSCI conference. I love AGOSCI. The Australian AAC Community is so inclusive and supportive – and extremely clever! The AGOSCI 2017 conference was fabulous as always – and I’m just sorry that for the first time in 25 years I’m not attending the whole

Targeting Onset Rime with Emergent Literacy Learners

Feb 10, 20178 Comments

Phonemic awareness is an important skill – it is what we use to hear sounds in speech. Without phonemic awareness, we cannot break words down and decode them to read unfamiliar words. We also find it extremely hard to re-code words to spell them. Therefore, phonemic awareness is a very important skill in learning to

Switch Accessible Apps List: Updated!

Mar 7, 201511 Comments

Updated to add: The Switch Accessible Apps List has been discontinued. It has been quite some time since we updated our switch accessible apps list – nearly 18 months in fact! During this time we have been focusing on the Switch Control built into iOS and learning the range of options it now provides.

Using the AAC apps list

Oct 6, 20142 Comments

Updated to add: The AAC Apps list has been discontinued It’s October, so it’s International AAC Awareness Month. As a result I thought it was time to blog about one of the most accessed resources on this website – the AAC apps list. Earlier this year we needed to do some changes to the AAC

Brain Computer Interface at ISAAC 2014

Jul 29, 20142 Comments

Last week I was very fortunate to attend the ISAAC Conference in Portugal. One of the highlights for me was learning more about Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and even getting to try one. Dr Melanie Fried-Oken, who is a really fabulous and practical researcher in the area of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) presented about

How do I use a switch with an iPad? iOS 7 Overview

Sep 29, 201375 Comments

The latest operating system for the iPad/iPhone/iPod touch, iOS 7, has introduced some major changes to the accessibility of these devices. In particular, switch access is now built right into the accessibility options, providing operating system level alternative access to these tablet devices for the first time – and this update is the main purpose