How do I edit or modify the contents of a board in CoughDrop?

CoughDrop allows many different customizations and configurations for communication boards. The goal is to make editing boards as easy and straightforward as possible. Boards are made up of a grid of buttons (for now, visual scene displays coming later) that can be edited individually or in bulk. We'll go through all the editing options individually.

NOTE: You can edit any speech board owned by your own account or the account of someone you supervise. If you want to customize a publicly shared board within CoughDrop you can make your own copy of that board or board set and then edit your copy to fit your needs. Learn more about copying a speech board in our support article here.
Copy a Publicly Shared AAC Board in CoughDrop

How-to video

Entering Edit Mode

Once you have made a copy of a board or created a new board you should be able to edit that board to customize its content. First, hit the "i" icon on a board preview image or exit speak mode to go to the board actions page and then hit the "Edit Board" button to enter Edit Mode.

Edit Mode interface

The Edit Mode interface should look familiar, it is not that different from the other modes available in CoughDrop. Along the top are a number of buttons.

Edit Mode header

The "Edit" and "Paint" buttons are used to switch between standard editing and painting (see the painting walkthrough). Next you have "Undo" and "Redo" for working around mistakes while editing. The "Grid +/-" button lets you add and remove rows and columns to the button grid **NOTE** If you remove rows or columns from your board and then save the changes those buttons will be deleted permanantly from the board.

The "More" button lets you edit things like the board's description or license, and also access the button stash.

Changing the label on a button

While standard editing, you can hover over any button to bring up the label text box. Clicking or tapping in the label area lets you edit the label for this button without bringing up the more detailed button settings view. If you enter a label for a button that doesn't yet have a symbol specified, CoughDrop will auto-search for a symbol for that label and use it. You are of course free to change to a different symbol if you like. CoughDrop learns over time the most-preferred symbols for certain labels/words.

Opening button settings

If you touch or click anywhere else on the button then the button settings window will appear. There are different sections in the settings window, and which section loads first depends on where you select. Hitting the symbol brings up the symbol settings section, hitting the word bubble icon brings up the action section, etc. Let's go through each section one at a time.

General button settings

This section lets you define the button label, and also the border and fill colors. You can also clear the button contents and perform a couple of different actions like swapping button positions and copying to the button stash from this section.

Picture button settings

This section lets you search for, upload, or take a photo to act as the symbol for this button. You can also enter a URL into the search field to specify a specific image available on the web. After you have selected an image you can perform some basic modifications like cropping and colorizing the image before saving it.

Action button settings

This section lets you define the action that will occur when users select this button. Buttons can vocalize the button's label or sound, navigate to a linked board, open a web site in a browser tab, or launch a mobile application.

Sound button settings

This section lets you specify a different text for vocalization (for example if you have a button with the label "hungry" that you want to actually say "I am hungry" you would enter that text here) or inflections or spelling. You can also record an audio sound or upload a pre-recorded sound to be played instead of text-to-speech vocalization for the button.