Desktop Communication for Disabled People

I need a program to be written in VB.NET which will allow users to click on custom buttons to type, edit, and manipulate a message box on the page. There are many software packages which do this including BoardMaker, Tobii Communicator, etc. They can be downloaded to see how they work. None of them have Unicode support though and we need this to fully support Hebrew. This is a very scaled down repost of a much bigger project. We would like to start it out small and then go from there. Thanks, Ed ## Deliverables Hi, The first stage would be the design of the "IDE" where you create the pages, the message boxes, and the buttons, and the ability to enter and manipulate text. 1) Need an IDE to design the button and message layouts. At design time, buttons need to be placed, resized, colors changed, and have text placed in them. These buttons will add text to the message box when clicked in 'USE' mode. It would be nice if the characters or words to be added by the button not have to be the text on the button. In Board maker there's a checkbox in the button setup if you want to automatically add a space after pressing the button. That's a very useful checkbox. 2) Buttons need to be able to do a bunch of different basic command and more than one at a time. This is how it works in Board maker. You might assign a button to move to the word to the right, delete the word, and then move cursor to end of message box. Like macros. 3) Important to note that almost all of the commands for the buttons are simple things like delete, backspace, move cursor 1 letter right, left, move cursor 1 word right, left, etc. I still need to make the complete list. 4) We only need one message box per page. For now, don't let them place more. 5) We need to be able to lock a user out of design mode which would include hiding the design elements. It shouldn't be easy to exit the program. In Board maker, you have to hit esc to get back to design mode and if there is not button to exit on the screen, my clients cannot get out. That's important. 6) Everything about the layout should be saved in text files. Different pages should probably be different text files. 7) My clients are used to having an audio feedback when they click buttons. We should have an audio file attached to button clicks. This feature should be able to be turned off. 8) Everything needs to be in VB.NET 9) There needs to be multiple pages. Buttons should be able to be programmed to open another page with the contents of the message box remaining. 10) For this stage we do NOT need word prediction or and text to speech. Right now we just want to work on the IDE and button / message box usage. Thanks, Ed