Parlez-vous SCRIBBLE?

As "blog denizens", you are familiar with the term Scribble and maybe even have tried it over the past few months. We are most often on the receiving end of communication ideas, and we have learned a lot about ways to communicate with novel technologies from our team at the Healey Center and Boston Children's Hospital. Without really knowing how we stumbled across Scribble, we are pleased to have been able to turn others onto its virtues, among them: creates a permanent record of conversations, allows for artistic and linguistic expression, poses no significant learning curve, facilitates conversation over the internet and within the room, works in a lane that is somewhat different from speech augmentation. We love it.

In another setting, I spoke about some of John Costello's work assisting with speech loss at Children's Hospital, text-to-speech devices, and advances in tiny speakers that allow a great deal of direct communication while sitting in the same room. But Scribble has taken an important role that rivals ZOOM, especially for Deb, and is really fun to use.

The Scribble application is not something you have to download and pay for to get access when speaking with Deb. Schedule a FaceTime, and Deb will share a link that you key in on your end at Scribble.cool. I have spoken with one of the company founders, and we are encouraging them (and others) to get the word out for its power to assist those with a voice that needs to be heard through new means.

A sign that John Costello keeps by his desk at Boston Children's Hospital.

Don't wait for a big ZOOM call. Schedule Scribble time. If you have never tried it, some pointers. First, always let someone who is using speech augmentation finish a comment and don't feel the impulse to read it in process. (I do this way too much in daily interactions, and it is annoying/frustrating to Deb; imagine someone "guessing" all your thoughts based on fragments of sentences.) Second, enjoy life "slowed down". I notice when I am around other competitive people that there is often a race to draw conclusions and be right. Savor simplicity. Less is more. You learn the power of language when you carefully curate what you say. Third, accept rejection. Okay, so maybe today or this week are bad times to Scribble or set up a call; and it might need to be pushed off for a few days or a week. Get is scheduled on Deb's calendar. Finally, agree to a time limit. Goodbye is never easy, so put the egg-timer next to the screen. More short calls are better than unending calls or no calls at all.

We trust that all of you are getting used to the new freedom a post-vaccine world offers. Tell us what you are doing; we need ideas. We had our first night out at a real restaurant, socially distanced, with Nancy and John Watkins who were here from San Francisco. And we are planning to bust Wanda from the garage in the next two weeks and looking forward to a Washington wedding with Deb's family on May 22. And then there is the big 6-0 on May 28.

We are all trying to reengage our social muscles. Scribble is one way to do it.

Opening Day is coming soon.