Thank you everyone for coming. We all have big workloads and I really appreciate you picking out this session and giving me your attention for an hour. I really hope you get a lot out of it.

Housekeeping

• You can view this presentation at http://joereddington.com/slides/cm2019/

• Go ahead and tweet, I'm also auto-tweeting the slides as they come up.

• Who Have I got? (show of hands)

Presenter Notes

Let's start with housekeeping, if you have trouble seeing the slides in this room you can bring them up on your own devices with that link. Handy if you want to quickly go back or indeed, skip to the end.

The slides will also be autotweeted @jr_inPerson so if you want to later ask questions about any of them, that's a good place to start...

This presentation isn't strictly speaking about the Open Voice Factory, but you need to know a bit about it to go forwards

18,000 people in the UK would benefit from powered AAC but don't have access. Cost is understood to be one of the big barriers. And it's not just that the system costs a grand it's the time and the energy of the appointments to be assessed for funding.

So we started the Open Voice Factory - which is an entirely free AAC device. If you go to the website you can click the link and use the default version.

If you want to edit it, that's cool, we actually use Powerpoint as the editing device, you download the file, make changes to it, and then upload it again. The Open Voice Factory will give you a unique link that is to the aid you just created.

It uses the Open Board format so it's entirely compatible with things like CoughDrop and Optikey.

This was how I was going to change the world, and it's failed. People aren't using it and I don't know why. I wish I did, I and lots of other people have poured our hearts into it and it's not getting used. So if anyone has an idea, then I am all ears.

I'm going to keep running it, almost entirely out of stubboness, but that's actually the subject of this talk. And I should move on.

So the reason for the talk is that Comic Relief gave us £45,000 to work on the Open Voice Factory and it would be good to tell people what we did with it. There are things I'm proud of and things I'm ashamed of.

Lots of things happened and I've tried to pick out the things that I think you would be interested in. The rest of the talk is roughly divided between those things however, I'm going to be lead by you. If you look bored I'm going to move on, if you look interested I'll spend a bit more time with it. If I skip your favourite bit then come see me afterwards I'll talk about it personally.

So, watching your faces carefully... I'm going to talk about how to get comic relief to give you £45,000, which I think will be useful because some of you have similar projects. Okay,

I'm going to talk about the overall project plan, what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it.

I'm going to talk about medical device registration, hopefully in an interesting way, and if any of you are event thinking about developing any tools or resources then you'll need to hear that.

I'm going to talk about Fraud, it's not particularly AAC related, but it happened to us, it wasn't very nice and we got hurt. And if you are ever going to pay a programmer you might want to know about it.

If you haven't ever managed a project should you probably know that 90% of your budget is staff. Everything else is just noise. Staff is everything.