PAACs4Web
Symbols, over any page.
A browser extension that puts a PAAC symbol above every word it knows, on any website. The same thing SuperAAC does in the writing area of a board — the picture above, the word underneath — so somebody who reads with symbols can read an ordinary web page the way they read a board.
Free, like everything the Lab makes. There is nothing to sign in to.
What it does
- One button
- Press it and the page you are reading gets symbols. Press it again and the page goes back exactly as it was — it works on the text, not on the page, so links, buttons and anything the site's own scripts are holding on to are untouched.
- Any site
- A news article, a school portal, a form, an email in a browser tab. It can also be left on so that symbols appear as you browse; that asks for permission to read the pages you visit, at the moment you turn it on, and does nothing if you say no.
- The same 688 symbols
- The PAAC core set, on the same Fitzgerald colours as the boards — yellow for people, green for actions, blue for describing words. Somebody who learned the set on a board is not learning a second one to read a page.
- Nothing leaves the machine
- Every symbol is in the download, so the extension never asks anything for anything. It could not build a record of what you read even by accident.
What it will not do
Between a tenth and a half of the words on a page carry a symbol, depending on the language. The rest stay as plain text, and that is a decision rather than a limitation.
- It does not guess
- A word the symbol set does not have is left alone. There is no nearest-match and no stemming, because a wrong symbol over a word is worse than no symbol: it says something the writer did not, to the one reader least able to check it against the original.
- What that cost
- Two rules were written and thrown away for putting the wrong picture over a word. Stripping a plural "s" put CHANGE DIAPER over "changes" and NOT NOW over "minutes". Using the symbol set's own search terms directly put ABUSE over "being" and WEEK over "days" — right for a search box, where a person picks from the results, and wrong here, where nothing picks.
- Irregular words
- "is", "was" and "has" share no stem with BE and HAVE, so they stay as text. An unsymbolised word is a gap a reader can see past; a confidently wrong one is not.
- Seventeen languages
- Each one matches its own words, from the symbol set's own labels in that language — never English words translated as it goes. A language the set has no words for shows nothing at all, which is deliberate: pointed at Italian, the English word list does not fail quietly, it puts alphabet cards over "e", "a", "o" and "i" and the English FAST over German "fast", which means "almost".
- Words, not endings
- Outside English the set gives one label per symbol and no search terms, so Italian "cane" is matched and "cani" is not. Japanese and Chinese are cut into words properly rather than at spaces, or they would match almost nothing.
The floating button at the bottom of this page does the same thing to this site, without installing anything. It is the same code: the extension carries a copy so that it has something to run when it is reading a page that is not ours.