Apple’s touch screen devices have revolutionised the way children and young people on the autism spectrum are able to learn, develop and communicate. There are thousands of applications available to parents, educators and people with autism, from expensive communication solutions to fun games for both children and adults alike. Prices vary dramatically, and some of the more complex apps are worth the investment. But there are also lots of cheap and free apps that are also very effective in helping people with autism develop a wide range of skills. Here are five of our favourites:
Proloquo2Go
£109.99
Proloquo2Go provides a full-featured augmentative and alternative communication solution for people who have difficulty speaking. It provides natural sounding text-to-speech voices, high-resolution up-to-date symbols, powerful automatic conjugations, a default vocabulary of over 7000 items, advance word prediction, full expandability and extreme ease of use. Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.
Grace – Picture Exchange for Non-Verbal People
£22.99
Grace is a non-speaking, simple picture exchange system developed specifically for people with autism. Users can select pictures to form a semantic sentence that they can share by tilting the device to create a full screen view, and pointing at each card to hear the listener read each word (full screen view is not needed on the iPad). Users learn to attempt their own vocalisations with the pictures serving as a back-up or prompt, encouraging independent social interaction. Comes with a basic vocabulary of pictures, which can be fully customized using images from your camera, phone or the Internet. Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.
iCommunicate
£5.99 for iPod / £29.99 for iPad
iCommunicate allows users to create pictures, flashcards, storyboards, routines, and visual schedules, and record custom audio in any language. Add pictures from your camera, phone or the Internet. Helps teach social skills to children and young people with autism. Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.
AutismXpress and AutismXpress Pro
FREE / AutismXpress Pro £1.19
Designed to encourage people with autism to recognise and express their emotions through a fun and easy to use interface using basic facial expressions. AutismXpress Pro offers two new games to help people with autism interpret emotions and understand facial expressions. Both are compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.
Talking Tom Cat
FREE
Tom is your pet cat that responds to your touch and copies your words and sounds in a funny voice. You can also pet Tom to make him purrr, poke his head, belly or feet, grab his tail to make him Meeeow, pour him a glass of milk, make him scratch the screen and record videos of him. Great for encouraging vocalisation and hours of fun. Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.
If you are interested in finding out more about how new technologies are helping people with autism, the Autumn issue of Communication, the National Autistic Society’s member magazine, will be featuring a number of articles on the topic. For further information, click here.
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