Page sets

Also called Vocabulary package, Grid set, Vocabulary file, Language system

The complete vocabulary and layout loaded on a device. It is the real product, and changing it is a bigger decision than changing the hardware.

What it is

A page set is the whole vocabulary on a device and the way it is laid out: every page, every cell, every link between them, the symbols, the colours, the keyboard and the settings. Suppliers ship page sets under their own names, and a person's device is usually described by its page set rather than its hardware.

Two identical tablets with different page sets are two different communication systems, in the way that two identical laptops running different languages are. When someone says "she uses Grid" or "he's on a core-first set", they mean the page set.

Who it can help

Everyone with a dynamic display device has one, whether they chose it or not. The choice matters most at the start, because a person who has spent two years learning where words live in one set has to start again in another, and most never fully do. That is why switching page sets, or even switching apps, is a decision to make slowly and with the person.

Children usually start on a symbol-based set with a small grid that grows; adults who can spell often start on a text-first set with symbols behind it; people with aphasia have sets designed around photographs and familiar phrases.

How it works

A set is designed around an organising principle: pragmatic, semantic-syntactic, category-based, or a visual scene. It comes in several grid sizes, and a good one keeps the same word in the same place as the grid grows, so a child moving from 20 to 60 cells doesn't lose their motor plans.

Sets are editable. Words can be added, hidden, moved and re-recorded, and pages can be built for the person. That is the personal vocabulary layer. The skill is editing enough to make it theirs and not so much that the design breaks.

Sets can be backed up and moved between devices, which is what makes a replacement device tolerable. A set that has never been backed up is a system that can vanish in one drop.

Getting started

Find out what page set the person has, and write it down in the communication passport with the grid size. Anyone new needs that before they touch a setting.

Back it up this week, and put the backup somewhere other than the device.

Before any change of set, ask two questions: what can't the person say on this set that they need to, and could that be fixed by editing rather than replacing? Replacement is a last resort, and if it happens, the person's most-used words should be in the same places in the new set wherever that is possible.

Where to get help

The speech and language therapist or specialised AAC service that set the device up should be the first call. ACE Centre publishes independent guides to the sets from each supplier. Smartbox, Tobii Dynavox and Liberator run free training on their own sets, and Communication Matters has user groups who know what living with each one is like.