Sesla Dev Log

Building an AAC app that gives everyone a voice.

Sesla is an Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) app for speech-disabled children and adults. First-class Turkish, English, and Spanish support. Built with Flutter by Gökhan Oğuz, the original creator of Konuşan Parmaklar, Turkey's first AAC app.

May 30, 2026
The Language I Wouldn't Name

A few weeks ago I refused to say which third language Sesla was getting. It was Spanish. The story of actually filling it in — gender agreement and the personal "a", a tile-face cleanup for slashed words like Doctor/a, a two-pass catalog dedup, a deletion bug that hid from my own phone, and a "Beta" sticker that went up and came back down.
May 9, 2026
Name That Thing

Sesla gets a naming practice mode — show an emoji, say the word, get progressive hints when you're stuck. 185 items across 12 categories, custom photo items, speech-to-text matching, and a sensible free-tier gate that doesn't punish people doing actual rehab.
May 4, 2026
The Third Anything

I sat down to add a third language to Sesla. The codebase didn't know it had ever lived in only two. A day of non-behavioral refactoring — exhaustive switches, a tiny sentence-engine interface, a translations table that auto-mirrors writes — and the next language will land in roughly the time it takes to write the labels.
May 1, 2026
The Necessity Tile

One new tile, Gerek, that turns any verb in the app into a Turkish necessity clause. Subject pronoun goes genitive, the infinitive becomes a verbal noun with possessive, and a small engine fork pays back across the whole vocabulary.
April 30, 2026
Spotty and the Missing Pronouns

A confused-looking Benekli tile in the Turkish people category turned out to be a translation accident. Pulling on that thread uncovered four of the six core pronouns hidden in the wrong category, and a custom-symbol editor asking users to translate their own grandma into English.
April 29, 2026
The Android Shakedown

First real-device pass on Android. A silent sqlite crash from an end-of-life plugin tag, a soft keyboard that wouldn't quit across hot restarts, a locale that lagged behind a profile switch, and a Turkish board with one too many columns. Four bugs the simulator and 1030 tests both missed.
April 29, 2026
Teaching English the Turkish Way

A 284 case sentence benchmark for the English morphology engine, a peer review from a different AI model, and the small handful of fixes that came out of it. Including a one tile negation trick borrowed from Turkish.
April 28, 2026
Walking the English Board, One Screenshot at a Time

A screenshot-driven QA pass on the English locale. Lowercase labels, missing assets, baked-text duplicates — every defect visible in the simulator, fixed in a single afternoon.
April 25, 2026
Custom Art and the Deduplication Marathon

Generated 387 custom SVG symbols across 16 categories, ran two dedup passes to cut visible symbols from 950+ to 457, and fixed the sentence helper row. The visual identity takes shape.
April 20, 2026
Possessives, Helpers, and 679 Tests

Added possessive morphology, in-category sentence helpers, loanword exceptions, and hit 679 tests. A day of grammar fixes.
April 16, 2026
Teaching an App Turkish

3,436 symbols translated, 325 culturally filtered, a grammar engine that conjugates verbs and declines nouns. The localization story.
April 12, 2026
Building an AAC App in 2026

Flutter, Turkish morphology, 610+ tests, and an AI pair programmer. A technical look at how Sesla was built.
April 01, 2026
Sesla is Back: The Return of Konuşan Parmaklar

Years ago I built Turkey's first AAC app. The tech wasn't ready. Now it is. This is the story of why Sesla exists.