Acrylic AAC Keyguards

Attachable touch guides for tablets

Materials

Cast acrylic

Tools

Laser cutter, Adobe Illustrator

Timeline

Thirty minutes in Nolop

The Product

Keyguards are guides that go over a touchscreen device, usually a tablet, to ensure that the user clicks the right parts of the tablet. Keyguards are designed to interface with a specific tablet version using a specific app, most often a communication software. This keyguard is for the TouchChat WordPower42 app.

Keyguards are perfect for people, with cerebral palsy for example, that use communication apps on their tablets but don’t have the hand control to precisely press the correct button without pressing other buttons. Keyguards enable agency and socialization by helping people communicate.

I’ve made keyguards in the past (for Assistive Tech Foundations!) in a much harder fashion—figuring out the dimensions and CADing every keyguard opening by hand—so I was delighted to discover these pre-made files and the new .dxf file-generating software!

The small hiccups with this keyguard is that I inputted the incorrect acrylic thickness into the laser cutter, so the laser was a bit too strong and left burn marks on the plastic! I’ve never used such a thin acrylic width, so this process was a good reminder to double check the thickness settings before cutting.

The Process

I’ve laser cutted many times before and have also made many keyguards, but now I have more practice with those processes and know about the softwares that can make the keyguard ready-to-cut files for me. I’ll never have to hand measure them again! :-)