Appearance

From the Appearance tab, you can modify many parameters related to the formatting of text, cells and board to fully customize the communicator and adjust it to the user’s skills and characteristics.

Before detailing the 3 sections into which these appearance adjustments are divided, it is important to highlight how there is a Preview feature where we can see “on the fly” the changes we make to the parameters.

(IMPORTANT) We should always check in the communicator that the defined parameters meet our needs, since some of them can be influenced by variables such as the size of the cells, which in the preview does not always match the size they have in the communicator.

Moving on to describe the three sections of this tab, first we have QUICK SETTINGS which allow you to:

• Reset to default settings.
• Set the color mode for the background, border, or both (background + border) for the cells.
• Adjusting the communicator to light or dark mode is a very useful feature for improving visibility. It’s also worth noting that the Cell option allows you to set any desired background color, as well as any text color.

The second section is the settings related to the TEXT OF THE CELLS.

Within this section, we highlight the following parameters:

• Transform cell text: This setting allows you to force the text you’ve entered into a cell to be displayed in uppercase or lowercase, or exactly as you typed it. This setting also applies to special cells, such as those for text prediction (on keyboards), so it can be useful to force uppercase if, for example, you use a keyboard in uppercase and want the keyboard prediction cells to also display the text in uppercase.
• Font size (text + image): This setting applies to all cells containing both image and text. It’s advisable to check the font size in the communicator itself, as well as in the preview, to ensure it meets your needs.
• Font size (text only): This setting applies to cells containing only text. It also applies to special cells, such as those for text prediction. We should also check on-site whether the defined size is suitable for our communication device.
• Long text handling mode: This is an important setting if your communication system uses long texts that exceed the cell’s available space (with or without an image). In such cases, it offers three options: Auto-adapt, truncate, and truncate and add ellipses. The default mode is Auto-adapt. In this mode, if necessary, the text is displayed in a smaller font size to fit the entire cell. In the other two modes, the text is truncated after a certain number of characters. Even though the text is truncated, it is spoken aloud in full.
• Maximum number of lines (text + image): This variable is very useful for managing long texts, as it allows you to configure two lines, thus accommodating longer texts without having to cut them or reduce the font size. In return, the image accompanying the text is reduced in size. Therefore, this option can be used in conjunction with the one explained previously.
• Automatically resize keyboard letters: This option, which is selected by default, resizes the text in cells that contain only one character (no image) to fill the cell space as much as possible. It is primarily designed for keyboards, but it can also be applied to cells outside of a keyboard that contain only one letter (such as “A” or “O”).

The third section of the appearance tab allows us to configure the appearance of the CELLS.

Within this section, we highlight the following parameters:

• Default cell background color: When in advanced options we have disabled the “Enable use of color codes for categories” option or we do not define categories in the cells, the cell background color will be the one we have defined in this color picker.
• Color mode: This option allows us to switch between three modes: background, border, or background+border. The background mode will display either the default background color set in Default cell background color or the colors of the corresponding category if selected in advanced options. Enable the use of color codes for categories. Border mode, on the other hand, will display either the color we have set in the Default Border Color option or the color of the corresponding category if we have that option active. Enable the use of color codes for categories. Finally, the background+border mode will display either the default background color set in Default cell background color and the border color set in the Default border color option if the use of color codes for categories is disabled, or the colors of the corresponding category if we have selected it in advanced options. Enable the use of color codes for categories. In this case, the border will be shown in a darker tone than the background so that it stands out.
• Color scheme for categories: This menu allows you to select between two color schemes for the cells where you define categories: Fitzgerald or Goosens, and three color tones for each. The Fitzgerald Extended key uses 10 categories, and Goosens uses 5.
• Activate the use of color codes for categories: as we have mentioned before, by activating this option, all cells that have a defined category (whether from the 10 of the Fitzgerald key or from the 5 of Goosens) will show the corresponding color either as the cell background color or as the border color (depending on the color mode you have set).

Finally, we have 3 parameters that allow us to configure the appearance of the cells in terms of border thickness, corner rounding, and cell spacing.

The fourth and final section we have is BOARD.

Within this section we have two configurations:

• Default background color for the board: Here we will define the default background color for the boards that make up the communication system. Later, in the settings for each board, you can customize it for each one if desired.
• First row height factor: This setting allows you to configure the height of the first row (increase or decrease it). The setting starts at 1, which means the first row will have the same height as the other rows on the board. For example, setting it to 1.5 increases the height of the first row by 50% compared to the other rows. Conversely, setting it to 0.70 makes the first row 30% shorter than the other rows. This setting applies to the global board (where the first row typically contains the accumulated phrase) and to boards where the global board is disabled.

(TRICK) One of the uses of the first row height adjustment is to be able to adjust the communicator to certain screen covers that are sold or 3D printed for tablet screens.