Everything Tagged with 'autism'
An iPad App Helps an Autistic Teenager Communicate
It appears readers with dyslexia aren’t the only ones with social difficulties finding benefit in the iPad. Here’s one success story about a dad who decided to create an iPad app to help his autistic teenage son better communicate:
Autism often includes physical limitations, such as motor- control difficulty, that make actions like speech or typing impossible. Some autistic people communicate using a card with a large alphabet on it, which they point to with a pencil to spell out words. This process often includes active participation by a facilitator who encourages the user and says the words as they are being spelled.
iMean presents a similar letterboard on the entire face of the iPad. The user points with a finger, and the app collects the words on its text display as they’re spelled out. iMean offers word suggestions to complete partly-spelled words, speeding up the conversation. The facilitator can participate, but iMean encourages greater communication independence.
“Dan was using it well within minutes,” recounts Bergmann. “He used it to tell me that his favorite feature of the app is word- prediction, because it makes him read more.”
This is admittedly straight from a press release, and what the app itself does is nothing remarkably new – Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices have been around a long time and taken many forms. What is new, though, is the admirably low pricetag: $4.99 for the app, which is a steal compared to similar single-function devices - which have in the past started well-into the hundreds of dollars.