SPEAKall! An App for Autism And Severe Communication Disorders

Enhancing communication skills for children with severe communication disorders.

Students in the EPICS Department at Purdue University have developed a new application for Apple’s iPad that helps children with severe autism learn how to communicate. The app, SPEAKall!, is designed specifically to help children with special needs learn the process of constructing sentences. Children with severe communication disorders who need intervention in the areas of augmentative and alternative communications (AAC) can especially benefit from the SPEAKall! app.

The app is fully customizable to each child’s specific needs. You can record voice and add whatever pictures you want to the app, creating a one-of-a-kind audio/image library from which a child can create his/her own sentences.

The app enables anyone with severe speech impediments to form sentences simply by dragging and dropping images into a bar along the bottom of the screen.

 

The app also helps children with autism to learn how to talk. Once a sentence is constructed, the app “speaks” the sentence, allowing the listener to hear it, which in turn helps build additional verbal skills. When an image is touched, the app will also “speak” that image, further reinforcing verbal skills.

Children with Down Syndrome and delayed speech development or more severe speech and language difficulties can also benefit from the SPEAKall! app.

This free app is only available for iPad devices. Click here to download the iPad app through iTunes.

Learn more about how to download and use the SPEAKall! app with this YouTube video:

Read more about the Purdue SPEAKall! app.