Show HN: Our startup launched: create visual supports for special education | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Our startup launched: create visual supports for special education

symbly.us

6 pointssilverlight8 comments

I know this isn't exactly our target demographic, but I'm very excited to share this with the HN community. My wife and I have been involved in special education for many years, and I'm constantly appalled at the state of the software industry in the field. We're trying to change that, and this is our first attempt. It's a new way to create and share visual supports for use in special education, such as with children with autism.

I would, of course, appreciate any feedback that you can give about the website, and if you or anyone you know is involved in special education, have them give the app a try as well!

Thanks for all the great advice over the years. This entire community is an inspiration.

EDIT: For those technically inclined, the app itself runs on a combination of Raphael JS, SVG, Backbone JS, Share JS, and Node.

I think it looks great. I'm not your target audience either, but my cousin is a special education teacher and she's very excited about it after I passed it along to her.

Great! Thanks! Be sure to let her know that we love hearing feedback, good or bad :-)

When adding text on a support, I can't seem to move it after I place it (Chrome - 19.0.1036.7 dev-m).

When adding a symbol, can you remove the text that it adds with it?

I add a tag but it doesn't seem to stay

(Parent of 5 yr old on Autism Spectrum)

Hmmm...I will have to download that version of Chrome and see what the problem is. I'm just running release (17.0.963.46).

You can remove the text by highlighting it and tapping the Delete key on your keyboard, or by right-clicking and choose "Delete". If you click the Gear icon that's above the Search box when you are in the Image Search dialog, you can set it to put automatic labels above, below, or not at all.

Are you trying to tag image results in your personal image library? Or tagging supports doesn't work when your browsing the site outside of the editor?

Thanks for the feedback! And feel free to email help@symbly.us if you would rather do this via email :-).

In case anyone finds this while Googling, this seems to be a bug in the Dev build of Chrome, I have submitted an issue: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=114190

I added a tag to the support itself but it doesn't seem to stay.

Right click and delete worked perfectly, but it didn't like clicking and then hitting the delete button.

Overall, I think this pretty awesome and combined with a tablet makes more sense than paying $2k+ for some of the devices available.

That's our thinking as well. And it becomes even better if we can really get a community going, sharing supports and advice. Our goal is to really change special education for the better. Thanks for the support!

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