Supporting Ukrainian refugees with AAC symbols and charts

We are all thinking about everyone in Ukraine at the moment and whilst we wonder how best to support them we felt it might help to highlight a group of psychologists, therapists, AAC users, families and carers based on the outskirts of Kyiv. The organisation is called DivoGra who have been around since 2015 working to provide AAC and AT support. Their information page describes their situation and has a donation button and a contact email. There is also more about the group and their resources that can be translated into English.

Many companies and organisation have also been offering free downloads of translated AAC boards and other resources in Ukrainian. We hope this collection will help those supporting refugees and AAC users in the coming months.

Tobii Dynavox has a page of free resources to download with communication boards that go from Ukrainian to several Eastern European Languages.

Smartbox has created six free communication boards to download as PDFs to help people quickly talk about their needs and health, using symbolised core words and medical vocabulary. These boards are available in Ukrainian-English and Ukrainian-Polish. Ukrainian-German communication boards are coming soon.

Metacom has several refugee German/Ukrainian bilingual boards to download with their symbols

Omer AAC Service's medical board is translated from Hebrew to Ukrainian as a PDF download and ISAAC are collecting more boards on their site

Ukrainian Translation Twinkl Symbols plus other resources from Twinkl UK site

SymboTalk - AAC Talker is available in Ukrainian.

Assistiveware also have a #OneDayForUkraine donation page.

Supporting communication by providing information and symbol charts and text in languages not usually seen with AAC symbols has long been our aim. The problem is that we usually need to ask voluteers to help with the translations and with Ukrainian this is no different, but it takes time. So we have started the process in the hope that kind volunteers can check the mistakes and let us know where they occur and tell us what the words should be! We have used Microsoft Azure Language Translation to translate the whole Global Symbols website as well as the Mulberry and Otsimo symbol sets. Please get in touch if you can help translate any of the symbols more accurately as we have an easy way to give you access to the labels and the website translation. Thank you for your support.