Apps for Communication

UATP partner, the Utah Center for Assistive Technology, welcomed a new employee this month to help with communication and education assistive technology evaluations. 

Starla Blackburn, speech language pathologist, has twenty years helping students under her belt. Learn more about her on the UCAT website. 

She has recommended these communication apps to UATP. Take a look:

AVAZ - $99.99 - Communication

Avaz was developed in collaboration with 25 schools and 500 children, to help children with autism achieve the most effective communication possible. Avaz is also useful for children with Down Syndrome, Angelman's Syndrome, Aspergers, Apraxia and other non-verbal conditions. Avaz’s user interface is designed to make speech therapy more effective, develop a child’s language, and improve his/her intent to communicate.

Avaz uses picture symbols and high-quality voice synthesis to help users create messages. It comes with 3 research-based, graded picture vocabularies, and a Core Words set that will help a child begin to communicate. These vocabularies have been designed to facilitate spontaneous novel utterance generation, encouraging a child to not only use language, but also generalize from it. 

While Avaz helps a child get started quickly with pictures, it's also great for facilitating easy transition into text. Avaz's keyboard has support for saving and loading text, a Quick response bar for frequently-used messages, and a picture-assisted text prediction capability for sight readers.

Talk Tablet - $79.99 - Communication

TalkTablet is a fully-featured AAC speech/communication solution for people who have difficulty communicating (speaking) as a result of autism, aphasia, Down Syndrome, stroke, laryngectomy or any other condition. 

TalkTablet generates speech output by offering buttons that contain words or phrases, or by using the tablet’s on-screen keyboard. Buttons can contain pictures, text, photographs or any one of the over 11,000+ SymbolStix communication symbols included with this app.

Prizmo - $9.99 – Reading and Writing Access – OCR Scanner and reader

Prizmo is a universal photo-based scanner app that lets you scan and recognize text documents, business cards, and images, and then export them as PDF/Text, vCard, or JPEG/PNG. Prizmo relies on state-of-the-art technologies, like a highly accurate OCR, real-time page detection, and beautiful image cleanup. Using iCloud, you can even shoot the picture on your iPhone, and finish editing on your iPad or Mac. All of this in an elegant and intuitive user experience.

Prizmo is made for everyone, and is thus fully compatible with VoiceOver. It provides voice guidance to help position your iPhone when taking document pictures, and will find the text orientation automatically if it's turned left, right or upside down. Prizmo's quick capture mode provides a fast path from picture to speech synthesis for an improved workflow, and it provides a high-quality voice reader (individual voices available as in-app purchases