Orientation cards that tell, and never test
When somebody is disoriented, the answers they need are the ordinary ones: what day it is, where this is, what is happening today, who has just walked in. Writing those down large, where they can be seen, removes the same question from the day fifteen times.
The cards themselves are easy. The wording is where they succeed or fail.
Statements, never questions
This is the rule that decides everything. A card says This is Anna. She is your daughter. She comes on Tuesdays. It never says Who is this?
Asking somebody to name a face and then waiting turns the card into a test, and being caught out by a test tends to distress people well past the moment that caused it. The distress outlasts the fact. So the sign tells; it does not check.
One idea per card
The commonest mistake is writing too much. A card with a paragraph on it gets skimmed and then ignored. Short sentences, present tense, everyday words, one idea each.
Say what is, rather than what is not. Anna comes at eleven reads better than Anna is not coming until eleven, because the second one has to be decoded before it can be understood, and it leaves a worry behind either way.
Use the names people are actually called
On a people card: a large photo, the name the person is actually called, the relationship in plain words — your daughter, not just Anna — and one or two grounding facts you choose. Warm, repeatable, easy to say out loud. She comes on Tuesdays. She has a black dog called Pip.
On which photograph: try more than one. Families often find an older photograph lands more easily than a recent one, and a picture of a daughter at twenty-five gets a warm response where this year's does not. That is something people notice rather than a rule, and it varies, so put up two and keep whichever gets the better reception.
Labels on doors and drawers
A large plain word on the bathroom door, on the cupboard with the cups, on the drawer with the tea. It costs nothing, it is undone in a second, and it takes a search out of the day.
Put them at eye height where somebody actually looks, which is usually lower than where you would hang a picture. Use ordinary capitalisation — Bathroom rather than all capitals — because a wall of capital letters is generally harder to read, not easier.
Why the day sign has to be written by hand
Our tool cannot show today's date, and that is deliberate rather than an omission. It runs entirely on your device with no clock and no network, so it has no way to know what day it is, and a date sign that is confidently wrong is worse than no sign at all — on precisely the sheet somebody is meant to be able to trust.
So the day, the date and the place are yours to write, and somebody changes the sign each morning. Paper has some quiet advantages here anyway. It does not need charging, does not lock itself, does not dim, and does not change unless a person changes it. The daily change is often worth something in itself: a small repeatable moment between two people, and a guarantee that the sign is only ever as current as somebody actually made it.
Printing a set
The daily orientation and people cards tool prints four kinds of sheet in very large plain type: one whole-page day, date and place sign; routine cards two to a page; people cards with a photo slot; and door and drawer labels. You get a print-ready sheet for each, plus a plain-text copy of the lot, made on your device.
Leave a box empty and it prints as a captioned write-on rule, so the same run doubles as a blank template. Type shrinks and wraps but never below the minimum size printed in the summary; past that it shortens the words and says so, because a large-print sign set in small type is a lie.
The tool says nothing about any person, offers no scores, levels or categories, names no scale or questionnaire, and makes no claim about what these cards will do. What helps varies enormously from one person to the next and changes over time. The person's own care team knows them and is the authority on their care.