8 Colour Coding Systems

7/29/2019 8 Colour Coding Systems

1/4

Sure Start Sheets 8 Voice Symbol I

1

Colour Coding Systems

Colour Coding SystemsBack in 1929, Edith Fitzgerald wrote a book entitled 'Straight Language

For Deaf' which, as its name implies, is a manual on a method forteaching language and grammar to those people who have little or no

hearing. Although Edith divides sentences up into parts of speech, and

has a key system for doing this, at no point in the book does she talk

about a colour encoding system (Fitzgerald's original key was based on a

set of six symbols with each standing for a particular part of speech).

However, such a colour encoding system has been attributed to her and it

has become known as the Fitzgerald Color (colour) coding system. It is a

means to classify different parts of speech and to make them easily

distinguishable from one another. Though there appears to be no one set

colour standard for every part of speech in the system, some colours are

consistently used:

adjectives blue

pronouns yellow

nouns orange

verbs green

beyond that there appears to be a

variety of colours used in what

generally is referred to as a

'modified Fitzgerald key':

adverbials brown

conjunctions white

determiners grey

expletives red

interrogatives purple

negations red

prepositions pink

It should be stressed that you will find all manner of variations on the

'Fitzgerald key' in use although it is recommended that you consistently

maintain at least one 'standard'.

Of course, there may be classes within classes: for example, there are

modal and auxiliary verbs as well as lexical verbs. All will be colour

coded green but a variation in the tone of green used can be made to

great effect. Also where nouns are grouped according to categories,

each category could have an alternating shade of orange such that

neighbouring categories are distinguishable.


2/4


2


Ways of Colour Coding cells

There are at least three ways of colour coding cells:

1.Background fill

A background fill is the most obvious of the colourencoding methodologies completely flood filling the

background to cell behind the symbol. However, this

method uses a lot of printer ink and, therefore, is

the most expensive. Furthermore, if you find that

when you print you are getting an error message

relating to the lack of available memory, switching

to one of the other colour coding methodologies may resolve the

problem.

Some images used for AAC systems (especially those

imported from the web) do not have a transparentbackground and when placed on top of a coloured cell

fill show the symbol background over the cell

colour. This tends to obscure the cell colour and

does not look visually pleasing, especially if some

symbols have the white border and some symbols do

not. Furthermore, such imported images will partially obscure any

fill scan used, if such an access method is employed. Imported

images should be selected therefore that have transparent

backgrounds: .jpg will always have the white surround, while many

gif files will not. Better still are vector graphics (.wmf) which

do not have backgrounds and will not pixellate if a re-size is

required.

2.Border colourBorder colour encoding utilises either the actual

frame of the cell or places an additional colour

border inside the frame. The width of the boarder can

be set by within the software by the board designer

such that it can be at a size that can be easily seen

by the Learner when s/he is using the board. As only

the border is coloured, less printer ink is used reduces printing

costs.

3.Title BarTitle Bar Colour Encoding places a strip of colour at

the top of the cell in a Monopoly property card

like arrangement. As the border colour methodology,

this process uses a fraction of the colour than a

full background fill and therefore also reduces

printing costs.

All the illustrations for this section use the Fitzgerald Key colour

orange to represent a noun for the symbol for banana. As long as the


3/4


3


use remains consistent through a board set, any shade or tone of orange

could be used as long as it distinguishable from other colours on the

board.

NOTE: For scanning systems Users, the scan type must be set to the

opposite of the colour encoding system used. For example: if a bordercolour encoding system is used, the scan type must be a fill scan. If

the background fill colour encoding system is used, the scan type must

be an outline scan. This is to reduce the possible visual conflict

between border colour encodings and border colour scans, as well as

between background colour encodings and background colour scans! The

scan position must be clear to the Learner and this is best achieved by

adopting a type of scan that does not conflict the colour encoding

system used.

Presently, Voice Symbol only provides the background fill colour

encoding methodology. The other encodings are planned but not yetcomplete. When they have been introduced, the designer will be able to

choose any method and then easily colour-encode cells.

Automatic Colour Encoding

Voice symbol includes an automated system for colour encoding cells to

save the designer both time and effort when building boards and ensuring

consistency across boards and systems. The A.C.E. (Automatic Colour

Encoding) system is switched off by default and has to be switched on

manually from the GM pane. Once turned on, as symbols are stamped into

cells so a background colour is automatically applied. The default

colours follow the Fitzgerald key, however, any colour can easily be set

from within the system. A problem occurs were a word can act as more

than one part of speech: as a high percentage of words in English behave

this way, it is a bit of a headache! Consider the word go. If you were

asked what part of speech it was, you would probably say a verb.

However, if you have a go at something; go here is acting as a noun!

Therefore, how can the software know what colour to add to a

background: green for a verb or orange for a noun? The answer is, it

doesnt. It has be taught both! It will first stamp one colour (green)

and then, if thats not how you intending using the symbol, it will

change it to another (orange) if you select F4 from your keyboard. F4

acts to cycle through the available colours for any vocabulary unit.

Some words have been assigned up to six colours because the word can act

as six different parts of speech!

Not only can you change the colour assigned to a part of speech, you can

rearrange the order in which the colours are stamped. As such, the

system is totally customisable. It is not the function of this Sure

Start Sheet to describe how to adjust the settings for the A.C.E.

scheme, this is covered in the user manual.


4/4


4


Colours can also be adjusted manually, if you are designing a cell that

is an exception to the rule and, so, all eventualities are covered.

Documents

8 Colour Coding Systems