These technologies and these practices are used by people who either physically can’t speak or can’t speak in a way that people understand them or that have other reasons why speech is difficult for them.įor example, what we see is that a lot of autistic people is they find speech extremely exhausting. It includes body gestures, it includes things like signing, it includes texting, but in the context of apps, we typically think more about the high-tech kind of solutions that use the technology, but all those other things are also what’s considered AAC because they augment or they are an alternative for speech. Let me start by asking you a little bit about AAC apps as a category because I’m sure we have readers who don’t know what they do and what augmented and alternative communication apps are.ĭavid Niemeijer: So, AAC is really about all ways of communication that do not involve speech. What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation. Each app addresses different needs, but what they all have in common is helping people who have difficulty expressing themselves verbally. To get a better sense of what some of this week’s announcements mean, I spoke to David Niemeijer, the founder and CEO of AssistiveWare, an Amsterdam-based company that makes augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) apps for the iPhone and iPad, including Proloquo, Proloquo2Go, and Proloquo4Text. There was a lot announced, and it can sometimes be hard to understand how features translate into real-world benefits to users. Earlier this week, Apple announced a series of new accessibility features coming to its OSes later this year.
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