1. 1
My name is Natalie. I have cerebral palsy. When I was 2 years old I
started to go to George Hastwell Special School. My Mum and Dad,
Teacher, the Head teacher and the Speech and Language Therapist at
school wanted me to be able to communicate but I could not talk or
control the movement of my hands or arms.
Nat at 2 years old
They found out I could use my eyes so showed me how to use
photographs and then Bliss symbols through eye pointing on an e tran
frame and on communication boards.
Bliss Symbols
Etran frame
Then my speech therapist went to a Mardis conference and saw
the ORAC communication aid, she told the head teacher about it and he

2. 2
bought one for the school to use, it was meant to be shared by quite a
few people but before long I was the main person using it. To start with I
used the ORAC by pressing a switch with my hand. This was very hard for
me but did give me a way to use the ORAC.
ORAC Communication Aid
First I used it to play with, playing games and music. My first overlay had
sound effects on, my favourite was a chicken, and it made me giggle a
lot. My first overlay to help me ask for things had eight things on it, this
had to be changed very quickly as drink was in the top left hand corner
and as this was the first thing scanned I often hit it by mistake and ended
up having a lot of drinks!
Mardis got in touch with George Hastwell School looking for
someone to put on their brochure. They wanted to look at a few of the
children who used the ORAC to find someone for their picture. The head
teacher said they would be bound to choose me but they wanted to
look. Anyway they did choose me so I was on their brochure for quite a
few years. Someone came and took a photograph of me then they had it
painted, I have the painting up in my house!
When I was 5, I went to Vickerstown Primary school. By this time I
was using 16 squares on my ORAC. My ORAC was used in levels but as it
used a paper overlay someone had to change this for me. A year later I
started to use 32 squares with row and column scanning. This made
switching a bit quicker for me but it was still hard. I also started to use
colour and shape encoding with my eye pointing charts.

3. 3
This is me at Vickerstown Primary
School
When I was 7 the ACE centre came to assess me, they suggested I
try using my knees to switch with. This was much easier. I was more
accurate and it was less hard work. To start with I used 1 knee switch so
I still had to get my timing right. After a year I used 2 switches, one to
move the scan and the other to select. Now I am back to using just one
switch as it is easier for me and I can do the timing very well.
Switches
When I first got my ORAC it only worked with digital speech, soon they
brought out an update which included synthetic speech. This meant I
had my own voice rather than someone recorded, it also meant I could
begin to use spelling with word prediction. I started using Ora talk which
was really quite robotic but when I was young I accepted this as my

4. 4
voice and so did my friends, when I got a bit older I got Dectalk which
sounded a better.
Initially we had not mounted my ORAC. When we tried to arrange
this we had a few problems. Because I was small and light and my chair
was light as well wheelchair services were worried that putting a
communication aid on my chair would tip it up. We had a few
discussions about this and in the end the manager of Mardis came to a
meeting, his idea was that because I was not using the ordinary foot
plate brackets on my chair, I had a different arrangement, we could use
one of them to mount the ORAC. Because it was mounted low down this
stopped my chair tipping so I was then able to have the ORAC with me
all the time.
Mounting
To start with I had been mainly using my ORAC to play with, do my
school work, answer questions, and ask for things, I did not really use it
for spontaneous communication. This changed when my parents took
me to Euro Disney for a holiday. When I came back I was desperate to
tell people all I had done and seen and so started to use my ORAC to tell
everyone about my holiday. Now I use my communication aid to talk all
the time so my parents did not know what they started by taking me to
Euro Disney! About the same time as this holiday I decided I did not
want to use symbols anymore. I wanted my overlays to have just words
on. By now I was also able to change the levels on my ORAC myself. I still
needed the overlay changing for me but often I could move between the
levels and knew what was on the buttons without the overlay anyway.
My Speech and Language Therapist thought I must have some sort of
internal map of my overlays in my head.

5. 5
By now the ORAC photograph was four years old and they wanted
a more up to date one. They came to school to take one. They wanted
me to be using my ORAC, I had been working in class on water and the
sentence I used when they were taking the photograph was “We use
water to flush the toilet”, it was a very funny photography sessions.
My next challenge was using a power chair. Ideally we wanted me
to be able to use my ORAC at the same time as driving my chair. Again
there were problems with mounting and also working out how I could
use my switches to control the chair. I have used different combinations
of switches to do this over the years including using switches with my
knees and my head.
By the time I was 9, I was using 128 squares on my ORAC. I was
mainly spelling but had different levels for some subjects. This did mean
that I potentially needed the overlays changing for me although I was
generally still managing to remember what was where on each level. As I
would be starting secondary school in two years and by this time my
ORAC was getting a bit elderly my parents began to look for a new
communication aid for me. They felt that a dynamic screen device would
solve the problem of overlays. We looked at a number of different
devices, I preferred a text based system with word prediction. I also
needed to be able to record my work and it was felt that it would be
easier if the software for this was available on the same device I was
using for communication. With my access difficulties this made sense as
it meant I would not have to get used to two systems. Eventually I got a
Cameleon. No one locally had worked with one before so it was a bit of a
challenge. With the ORAC everyone had been able to learn about it
gradually as I needed new features especially as it was a new device and
new developments tended to come out just as I needed them. With the
Cameleon I had to use it in a quite sophisticated way straight away.
Luckily my Mum got very good at it and often programmed things for

6. 6
school for me; my Dad was good at the technical side of things and
sometimes came out of work to sort problems.
When I was 11 I transferred to Walney Comprehensive School. As
well as the Cameleon I also got some other software including Clicker. I
used this for quite a lot of my school work. I did well at Secondary and
got 2 GCSEs, a C in Food Technology and a D in Science. I also enjoyed
learning languages including French, German and Spanish.
After school I went to a residential college quite a long way from
home, this did not work out so I came home and went instead to
Beaumont College. This worked well. At Beaumont I did a vocational
studies course, music, art and performance. I did a lot of computer work
I helped produce their newsletter once I term with news about what was
happening at college. We also made staff badges. While I was at
Beaumont I had a new Cameleon but this was a bit unreliable and kept
breaking down which was very frustrating. I became involved in
Beaumont’s Wheeltop project and Beaumont provided my with the Grid
2 based device I am using now.

7. 7
I use it for all my communication including e mails and texting and for
playing my music; I also go on the internet with it. This device is now
becoming old and unreliable so I have been looking at new
communication aids. As part of this process I tried eye gaze but this did
not work for me so I will continue to use my knees. I have chosen a My
Tobii C12 and am just waiting to hear about funding.
I think one of the things that has helped me is that I started to use
AAC very early and my parents encouraged me to join in with whatever
was going on. I learnt to use my ORAC to a certain extent before I went
to mainstream primary school so I could concentrate on what I needed
to learn at school rather than doing too much to learn my
communication system, although there was still a lot of work on that
over the years. I was also a guinea pig as I was the first person in my
local area using a communication aid in mainstream school. At the time I
was also one of the youngest people to have a complex voice output
communication aid.