 Welcome again. My name is Maurizio Berti and I'm from Italy, as you may see from my name. And I've been in the migration business for some time now, since 2004 maybe, first with OpenOffice and now lately with LiberalOffice. But I work for another company now, I'm working for this VNS company here. And but today I'm not speaking about migration because, you know, something new, finally. And this is a project and I was the project manager, the technical person who was on the project. There's a bunch of persons more engaged with the project than I am. And but of course they're not here. I'm going to speak about a little bit of the project, how it was conceived and what happened, and also about the technical part and show you hopefully a demo. So a little bit of background. So what's AAC? Of course we're talking about a software that's SimHelper and later I'm going to tell you what it does. But first you need to know what's AAC. This is an acronym, of course, my sound might look a bit obscure. I'm going to try to explain what it is. I'm not an expert, of course, I'm a developer. And AAC is a way of communication and includes a lot of communication that's different from the speech. So if you communicate by speech, there are other types of communication to communicate, for example thoughts, ideas, emotions, wants, needs and so on. And these are for example gestures, facial expressions, pictures, drawings, writings and so on. And this thing here is used with people with learning disabilities, disabled persons with handicaps to different levels and so on to let them learn, to let them express, and to let them in certain cases have a life. So but today we're going to focus on pictures and symbols because that's what SimHelper, again food, is about. So this is just an example of a typical symbol layout. The grid here it's because it's a screenshot, so this is something to tell. That has nothing to do with SimHelper. I'm just clarifying this because the thing here, the square outline has a very important role in what SimHelper does. And this is not, of course, a screenshot from the software. So every symbol there's a symbol and above the symbol there's the meaning of the symbol, actually that's the word of a specific language. Okay, here that is English to let you all understand what's up over the symbol, but of course we work with Italian. These symbols, for example, to give you an idea of an application, you can put them on something like this and this is called a communicator. And you can, for example, you can build libraries of symbol, split them into categories and for example you can have the action categories like go, eat, you can have the buildings categories like school, for example, hospital and so on. And everything, and if you give this to, for example, a child who has disabilities, you can let him use this to communicate. So you can just tap the symbols and build a phrase, build a sentence and push a button and the thing here reads the sentence. So we can communicate with you and the other way around, because he understands the symbols, of course he has undergone proper training, I mean somebody has explained, had explained to him how the meaning of everything and so on, but he can like go home, for example, push the go and push home, sorry, you can ask him questions or communicate via this thing here, because you can just build a sentence and show him. So it's done. But again, there's one more application that is books, that is what we are here for today. This is Italian, of course, books, they have a name they call in books, can ask me why, I didn't, I just like the name. And so the name is in books and you, what happens, you just take a sentence, you paste it to software, commercial software. And yeah, after some editing, because the skills here of the operator of this kind of software is that it transform the text from the original version to a version that can be translated to symbols, then you push the button and then the symbol version of the sentence comes out. And above there you have the translation, of course, at the center of our garden, it's Italian. And what happens is that the program, there are many, commercial again, proprietary, and they just output a document, maybe it might be a PNG, a JPG, a PDF file with all the text on the page. I'll show you an example in a minute. Okay, so from here where we go, we go here. Somebody, I mean, somebody, doctors and so on, found out that if you have a square outline around the symbols, the child understands better the relation between the symbol and the word above it. So this square outline plays a very important role in learning for this child, disabled child. Because what happens, when you read the book to the child, you just point that the name of this thing is called, is modeling. And you just read like at the center of our garden. So the child gets the relation between what you point, what you're saying, what the symbol is, and what the word is. So if after a long time and after using this type of symbols, the child begins to forget about the symbol, of course, and also learn how things are written. And he can read the actual books. So this thing is also used with foreign people, foreign and foreign languages. Because if you're foreign, like I am here, and I've seen Danish signs, I've been seeing for three, four days. So I could use this to understand, to learn Danish, but I won't. Again, this is the case. So you, and this is, this has been experimented and it has had good results. So problem is that there's no commercial software and you, that does this outline. And it was just the outline. Yep. That's the whole problem, the outline. What a problem. Yeah. But it is, you know what, because this is the problem, if you have to translate these phrases, okay, but if you have to translate more in peace, might be a problem if you do it by hand. It's a matter of time. So before CMLPR in Italy, people, people meaning technicians and people who translated the books did, they literally draw through the, this outline by hand, like with the ruler and the pen, or with, of course, with screenshots and they extracted the images from the PDF or the PNG file. And so they needed a way to automate this thing here. So that is, that's what the project about. And so the idea is not mine. There's a person, the name is Luca Errani, who's not here, I was on phone with him yesterday. And he's involved in this project, like all other parents of the child's are. And he, he was one who defies this logo here for Simpelper. This is actually the, the symbol for help. Okay. And so now we're getting a little bit more technical. So it began in 2012, like a common point Python script. So it just extracted the images from a PNG file. And the first contributor was Paul Mantovani, who is somebody who is being active in the open office part of the project. Then he left the project and he pointed Luca Errani to me. So I took over for the management of the product. And we are now here. We have a user interface, graphical user interface. We have an exit, an executable package to install it. And other features that I'm going to show you. Between there, there's also the current partner thing that went well, of course. So what are the things that we have to take into account? And I learned them, most of them, from Luca and from all the group. Those things are, what are the features of this program? Because the users are not have no technical background at all. And when I say at all, I mean it. I mean, it's the librarian who's doing this translation. It's the mother of a child and so on. I mean, people who have no idea what a Python script or even a program more or less is or how it's built. So it had to be automated. Of course, we cannot ask them to run a common line script as it was in the first version. Easy, very easy installation, like one click. And maybe a couple of yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, remember that we are all, we all have technical backgrounds, of course, but it's users we're dealing with. And and they're granting this software to be widespread and so to be, to have a great diffusion. So we have to support PDF as an input format, because PNG was not sufficient. And PDF you can, so if you support a multiple page PDF, we could translate books, literally, simple and fixed steps. So like with a wizard to get to the end, because in the first release was not very really understandable, but for some users. And in the end, we wanted editing capability, because editing meaning I get, I would like to get a document with images for it, and to place the images in different positions. That is, for example, an ODG or an ODP document of LibreOffice. So a little bit of how it happened quickly. Python script 2012. And so again, as I told you before, I met Luca Rani. And he told me his evil plan for this thing. And I jumped in because I really liked it. I volunteered on this project again. And then we got to a point where we had in mind our the first release and 14 we got an extra package, a minimal user interface, I'm going to show you in a slide later. And the final script. We also had an OIC state package, but it was like run the comment. I mean, just one one one one one one one item in that in the end. But yeah, we had problems and we got to the point where there we needed funds to bring the product to just to bring the project to the end. And so it's there somewhere there like April a little bit before. So it was March, maybe 2014, where when Luca Rani thought of this crowdfunding thing, and so it put on the page, it did all the dirty work. And finally, in a couple of months, he raised actually could raise the figures later, but it's like a five case five five, five thousand euros, which for something like this is quite, quite good. And of course, it helped us bring this project to the end. After the success of crowdfunding, we finally we released the bugfish version. That is important because the second, sorry, the first item drawing press check. This thing runs only on draw and press because it has capabilities of placing the images and so graphical capabilities. The problem is here, if you ran this on writer, you got an error, like object non defined or something like that. And that was the because we did we give support, free support to the users. That was the first support request. Nothing is working, because I get an error. And it was written like this big, don't run this or sorry, run this only on writer and draw. So what was our first but what fix, actually, it's not a fixed but check. And now we have, of course, we have a message more friendly that says, please run it and press or draw. And that saves a lot of time. Because, of course, in that case, they're not asking us for help, but they know what to do. A few more things. So it left an image folder. So the user where lights not working because I have images that I don't know what to do with them. So just put in something to remove it. And, of course, we have problems with special characters because in Italy, you know, we have the accents on the on the on the walls. And so in some cases, not all of them, it had problems. And so we got an error. And the final version, finally, this year, July 15, we got to a version of the user interface that we liked. Actually, I'm a wizard now, we can set lay out parameters like the thickness of the of the frame, the other frame. And for example, the spacing and other things and margins and so on. And again, another thing, we give process and feedback, meaning there's the bar, the green bar or below that moves. And so the user has an idea of that that something is happening. Another problem because nothing is happening. There's something that has something wrong with my property with the same offer that was another of our problems. Because in certain cases, it took a long time if you had PDF with many pages. So it's not working because but now that something moves, you get an idea what's happening. So how how it's built like this. Now, so we got a PDF input parameters like size of fire spacing that I told you through an XT. So there's a dial up. And you have, of course, you're going to see this in minutes. Then you press run. The extension passes everything to the Python script that who which sorry, extract the images and passes them back to the OXC. And the OXC places them on the type of document you select, you have selected. So odg or odp. Again, it was not right because they have increased everything capabilities and they're better at placing images and managing outlines. It's basically you choose the document from here. I mean, if you run this on on on on impress, it's going to be an impressed document to get as out. Yes, some specs, then we get to the real thing to give you an idea of where is of course, he runs also on open office. But now it has begun, we have we've gone focusing only on the graph. And because it started, of course, as open and Windows XP, this the seven and eight, eight, eight, what one, this is what we support, the graph is and we need go script to be installed for the conversion from PDF image. And then with the package with the similar per package, we also install convert by magic magic convert to convert the PNGs. Sorry, yes, to make another conversion. And the pillow library Python to handle images to actually extract them and cut them from the PNG. So this was the first session the April for 2014. So that's why and this was fine to to to to give you to to to to show this these Windows. So the first one is selected the size of the symbol. Second is page orientation because it couldn't detect the page orientation from the program. Now, of course, we're doing that. And you should match that. I mean, if that of course, if it was portrait, and you pushed horizontal, that's landscape, because you had problems because you were going to put symbols where there was no page. So that's why I'm saying, I was saying before, so fixed steps, very clear for the users. And the last thing is give it give me the file, of course. So let's see the real thing. Hopefully, if everything works, you know, did the demo effect. I've seen quite a few last days. Yes, got a wet machine because it's Windows. See if it starts. For who wasn't here at the beginning, I brought chocolates for you to thank you. Okay, so you've already got them. Thank you for being here. So I forgot to show you something in the document where we're we're starting from, which is here. So the output of the program looks something like this. We say, so this is a PDF. This is the PDF we're going to work on. And every person, whatever is the disability has the right fundamental right to influence the bicommunication. I didn't prepare this. I'm translating the condition of his existence. Okay, this is a kind of manifesto for the AAC community and so on. So we're going to work on this. This I'm going to show you. The error, the writer error. I'm very proud of it. No, really, it says that it saves us a lot of time. So this is Simmelper. I translated it last night because it wasn't Italian. So if I made errors. Run Simmelper, of course. And here we are on writer. And there you get a message. You need to run Simmelper from the press. So draw. Okay. Otherwise, in the beginning, you got the other message. It was a constant kind of unknown error for the user. So we just switch to draw, for example. And then we can do that. Hopefully, again, run Simmelper. And this is the wizard. So it's kind of a little bit different from the one I showed you before. So here you have, we just get, we just, sorry, it looks like, yeah, it looks a lot like. So this is the file. And of course, you can decide where to put again, this was a new thing in this version. You can decide where to put symbols, place them, just go here, you have the margins and the orientation detection, as I told you before. And of course, and in press, for example, the default margin is zero. So you get also get a warning, margin is zero, you should try and and set margin or if you, if you press next, you're going to end up with a margin at zero, what you want to do and so on. So we keep the margins. And here you have the page layout options, again, symbol size, thickness, spacing and line spacing. And here, again, for users, page size and a calculation of how many symbols, how many rows you can place into, with those parameters, it's, of course, it's computer real time. For example, if you go, I think that's something decreased. I couldn't see that, but yeah. So let's do this because it's better to place all the symbols with three. Yeah. So now we're done and hopefully it works. Now we say create, create. So this should be, you see here, okay, this is converged. And here you see the bar, give him some time. Yes, you see here, this is kind of the columns. And then it's kind of the rows and to detect the symbols and just tells you what he's doing. It takes a little time, of course, for a small file like this one. Yeah, there you go. For a small size like this one, and it's a movie, it doesn't work. Sorry. And okay, so this is what I was talking about. And yeah, this is basically what it does look. So this is what, of course. And there are reasons for that to have such a rose. I mean, his ability, for example, the third line is left alone. Yes, there's a reason for a placing of a symbol because the real skill here, how you format the text. So you form the lines. I have no idea. Of course, I'm just, I'm no AAC expert. And I know there's a reason for everything like for the commas and so on. For example, you, if you saw this, we don't support punctuation right now. So that's a possible improvement for the future. And odd sized symbols like not really square or rectangular, but this is a good help. I mean, if you, okay, it takes time, but if you let it run in some ways, it's going to do, it's going to put a square outline in one piece, as I told you before. So the matter of time, I mean, you don't have to be there and actually draw the lines. So back to the presentation, I've got a few slides. Sorry. So a couple of slides, four slides, I'm done. So this is the group behind it. This, of course, is my company, the company for which I work. All those are, for example, the third one is the volunteer association. This is with the L-System in Ramila, Romania. The first one is kind of not a volunteer association. It's like kind of like emergency, but a lot smaller, to give you an idea. It's an organization and all volunteers and people are hired to do the work, just in social business. And the second one is with Policini from Milano, that is a teaching hospital, big in Milano. And Luca Rani was, of course, from the first plan, the man behind it, the evil genius. So numbers, to give you numbers, I told you before, we don't know the users because, of course, it's been downloaded, so they didn't take care of counting the downloads. But it's actually 300 subscribers and we think that it matches more or less the number of users. And at least from the bail I'm getting for the free support, I think that we have for how many users. And this is the average donation, excluding, of course, 500 euros of donors. If you want to try this, this is where you can find it. The first one, of course, the first two are the talented downloads. If you want to have, if you want to get the English version just write to me and just pack it and ship it to you. Everything is GPL, by the way. And what now? This is almost not the last one. We have two more slides to go. What we would like to do is to implement now. So as I told you, non-square symbols, meaning punctuation like, or for example, small words like odd, that's smaller and has no standard size. And again, we would like to support Linux and macOS X. You know what? One question we got several times is why don't you support Word and Office? Really? Is it working Word now? And again, punctuation as I said before, we would like to have more row and page editing functions, like put this row symbols in the other page, split the rows and so on, because it's difficult to just insert an online break or something like that. We'd like to do some help, some video help. You might have seen in the sponsors, that's the other company we're involved with. We're doing those kind of things. So we'd like to use that, to do some video help, always again free from them. And localization. If somebody's interested in this, please contact me. So in other languages, if somebody knows that somebody could use this, we're free to help, we're free to collaborate. And I'm done. And this was something that told me look around yesterday. And I asked him, how should I conclude? You should conclude like this, meaning that at this time, the actual vendor of the commercial program that's doing the translation in symbols, they're thinking about implementing the square thing. From one side, and on the other side, we helped people really needing this thing to save a lot of time by automating the process of creating squares around those symbols. And finally, Ocarani told me, yes, in the end we had a lot of fun. That's true again. So I have to thank him probably for dragging me into this. So this is it. Thank you. I think you have no questions, right? I had one. The library is with the icons. It's not free. Not free. But they're working on that. I mean, they're working on that. There are a couple, three, four, like one big project is in Barcelona, for example, and they're working on building programs, translator programs with free icons. Of course, this software works with everything. I mean, as long as it gets a PDF in input. Yes, but what if the PDF contains vectorial images? I have no idea. I have no idea. You can try. I have no idea. I mean, yeah, do you think that there is this possibility that I have made some PDF with vectorial images? But since before undergoing the translation, the PDF gets converted to an image. Anyway, by convert. So I think it will be, yeah. The point is that we focused on a software, the name is Simrider, that writes the symbol, and it works. That's enough. But then, yes, it's a market leader. Thank you. Thank you.