5 Apps for iPad & iPhone to Help Your Autistic Child

The video above is a radio interview with the creator of the Grace App.

Autistic children benefit greatly from activities that ease them into communication skills. Apps that help them understand and recognize facial expressions and feelings are especially important.

Some children have difficulty speaking, or simply will never be able to do so.

Autistic children learn better from visual cues an require a dedicated and long-term therapeutic plan to help them do their best. Luckily, there are iPhone apps to help with all of these autism challenges.

5 Apps for Autistic Kids:

1. AutismXpress | Click to Download
AutismXpress is an app available on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch that allows children with autism to be able to communicate their feelings and emotions to others. Since many autistic children may not be able to fully comprehend what different facial expressions and feelings represent, this app will enable them to develop an understanding of a variety of feelings and emotions. It consists of a chart that has many common emotions such as happy, sad, angry and hungry and each is accompanied by a picture of that feeling so that an autistic child can easily match their feeling to the picture on the screen.

2. TapToTalk | Click to Download
This app is designed for autistic children who are non-verbal and serves as a augmentative and alternative communication device for either the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. With the simple tap of a picture, an autistic child can communicate with others as the device will speak for them. After an initial picture is chosen other pictures become available, which allows an autistic child to participate in a conversation with others. This app allows personalization, as users can include their own pictures and sounds and create thousands of options for a variety of situations.

3. First Then Visual Schedule | Click to Download
First Then Visual Schedule is a behavioral support app that is designed to illustrate a routine activity through the use of pictures. Parents can adjust this app to fit a variety of situations and can even use it to create a guide for events that happen on a day to day basis. It uses both pictures and voice to create any type of schedule that the parent or caregiver would like to create for an autistic child. Users can also import their own images to create a custom schedule and use it for a variety of situations.

4. Grace | Click to Download
This is another augmentative and alternative communication app that is aimed specifically for autistic children who are primarily non-verbal and gives them an opportunity to communicate with others. With this app, autistic children can create sentences from a selection of images and communicate their needs to a parent or caregiver. It fosters the communication process between the child and adult who can then respond appropriately depending on the string of pictures that the child chooses. A variety of categories can be found on this app such as food and drink, colors, clothes, places and things I like. The app comes with 400 pictures to choose from and it also offers customization where the user can upload their own images to personalize the experience.

5. Behavior Tracker Pro | Click to Download
This app allows parents, caregivers and behavioral therapists of autistic children to keep track and monitor common behaviors. It creates a graph so that these behaviors can be tracked and monitored. In addition, it also allows the user to record video so that a certain behavior can be captured and the parent or caregiver has the option to show the video to a child’s therapist so that an updated treatment plan can be created.

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Guest post by Jessica Bosari. Jessica Bosari writes for TherapistSchools.com, as site that matches therapists to the best schools. Students can learn about behavioral therapist salaries, physical therapy schools, and the many other therapy career paths by visiting the site.