Data – Perceptions of the Design of Communication Aids

‘Silence’ – A communication aid keyboard

We have recently had a paper published about some research we carried out in 2010 about users’ perceptions of the design of voice output communication aids. As well as the paper, you can also download and read the report about the project on the D4D website (free login required).

Part of this research was to carry out a national survey to people who used communication aids and professionals who worked with them.  The survey asked people how they felt about their communication aids.

We have now released the data that we gathered to allow others to work on it too:

• The ‘raw data’ collected is published on Google Fusion Tables – this is the combined data from all methods (online and paper) and all participants (users and professionals).
• The processed data collected is published on Tableau – with a simple visualisation of the ranking data. This data is organised with a ‘question’ variable to denote the question being answered and each of the measures (choice, current, rank, choice_pooled).

A few notes, if you want to work with this data:

1. It is particularly important to take into account how the questions were asked in the original survey: they were grouped as sections. Respondents did not consider each question in isolation.
2. There were two versions of the questionnaire (with the same core data). These are available to download: the users’ survey; and the professionals’ survey.
3. The survey was also published online using LimeQuery (the setup file for this is available on request) and also available in a simplified language, and also symbolised versions.
4. The qualitative information gathered in the survey is removed to preserve anonymity.

We have published the questionnaire under a Creative Commons licence. Please respect this and attribute the source. Better than this – please get in touch with us if you plan on using this data so we can discuss it.

We hope to re-run the survey in the near future – and plan to change some of the content and design based on what we learnt the first time.