App: Alexicom Elements Teen Home (Male)
Developer: Alexicom Tech LLC
Platform: iPad
Price: $19.99 
Category: AAC Apps (English)
*Also Available for Female Child, Male Child, & Female Teen
Over 100 Pre-Loaded Pages
Tired of app developers giving you the burden of customizing your AAC applications?
Many developers will just put together a great interface that is conducive to AAC tools, but will not make default pages for kids to start using right away.
Alexicom’s series of AAC apps does the opposite – they provide nearly everything that kids could ever need already loaded onto the device! There are tons and tons of pages, each with their own set of diverse buttons!
Using Alexicom Elements AAC App
There are a few major buttons that kids will use when operating this application
- Speak
- Speak and Clear
- Clear
- Undo
These are pretty self explanatory, but I would like to make a few comments.
First: MAKE SURE THAT YOUR iPAD IS NOT ON SILENT MODE. I nearly went crazy trying to get the app to speak a sentence, and it turned out that I had not flipped that all-important button on the side of my iPad. Whoops!
Second: Another benefit of this application is the fact that you do not need to go to a separate interface in order to type something into the text-to-speech box.
For Example: If you click on the button “I Want,” and then cannot quickly see the thing that you want, kids can just type it into the speech box, and the words will be said when they press “Speak” just as if they had clicked the button!
Conducive To Teens
Parents have emailed me countless times to complain about the fact that many of the apps do not meet their teen’s needs. Parents need applications that are conducive to kids in their teen years, but which are not necessarily of higher difficulty.
That is, some teens with autism feel that using a “younger” application is an unwanted (embarrassing) stigma that can affect the relationship that they build with a peer.
With Alexicom’s teen-specific AAC app (they also have versions for other ages/genders) this will not be an issue.
Hundreds, If Not Thousands, Of Buttons!
Here are just a few examples of the pages that Alexicom offers on its teens AAC application.
Keep in mind that these are pages - each page has about 16 different image buttons! Some of the pages available in the app are:
- Clues
- Colors
- Clothes
- Computer
- Movies
- Home
- Jell-o
- And many more!
You can also search for pages, and are even given the option to create your own! Just hit the edit button on the top left of the app and then the plus button on the top right of the app.
But, given all of the options that you have, I’m sure you won’t need to do much creating.
Images, User Data, and Settings
In the images tab, you can view user images, which come from your iPad or from its camera, or all of the images that are provided by Alexicom. And, I can assure you, there is an abundance of pictures to choose from.
User Data gives parents an interesting way to track how their kids are using the application at school, therapy, and day care, as it catalogues all of the actions that children take.
As I write this, I noticed that I said “I’m hungry watermelon” at least fifteen times. If somebody were to look at this, they would either ask me about an incident with watermelon or make the assumption that I have developed a taste for watermelon.
(Actually, it is a result of my episode earlier with the iPad being on silent.)
The settings, as is the case with many AAC apps, gives you a wide variety of settings and tools to mess with and have some fun with. Some are helpful, some are less helpful, but all are there for your use!
BUY Alexicom Elements Apps at iTunes:
