AsTeRICS Grid meets Global Symbols

Thanks to Benjamin Klaus and the netidee funding programme, which is part of Austria's major open source internet promotion campaign, we have been able to collaborate on the link up of BoardBuilder with AsTeRICS Grid.

Diagram of AsTeRICS Grid and Board Builder access to Global Symbols communication grids/boards/charts

This means that Benjamin has taken the original code for BoardBuilder and rewritten many aspects so that its boards or AAC grids will be able to be used by AsTeRICS Grid as well as still being available on the Global Symbols' site for printing or exporting for use with other applications such as Cough Drop, Cboard or Picom that use Open Board Format AAC grids, charts or boards in a similar way to AsTeRICS Grid!

It has taken some ingenuity to overcome some of the access issues and lack of documentation plus incomplete configuration for Open Board Format (OBF) zipped files (OBZ) that are created from a board set made up of several grids (or boards) using links between specific cells. For example a cell with the topic label 'clothes' may link to another board with different types of clothing to allow for more choice in a message.

Communication grid in AsTeRICS Grid (left) and Board Builder (right)

The migration of Global Symbols to a new server is well underway so pilot testing of both the entire service and this new intergration is about to happen! This is occurring between the two platforms prior to the release of Benjamin's amazing project and we are really excited that we can share this news.

As Benjamin has said in his blog "AsTeRICS Grid trifft Global Symbols" about the project "Sharing is caring!" and we just hope many more ideas can come from this open licence collaboration.