Accessible Literacy Learning vs GoTalk About It!

"The Accessible Literacy Learning (ALL) software is a trail-blazing reading program to help non-verbal students to learn how to read. ALL is designed to make literacy instruction easy, accessible, and engaging for children with disabilities. Developed by Drs Janice Light and David McNaughton of the Pennsylvania State University, the ALL Reading Program was created to meet the needs of individuals who require Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). It has been proven to be successful in teaching basic reading skills to individuals with complex communication and physical access challenges including autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, and developmental apraxia. The ALL software breaks reading down into component skills and provides direct instruction in each skill. The skills include letter-sound correspondence, sound blending, phoneme segmentation, single word decoding, sight words, and shared reading. Progress towards acquiring all the skills and sub-skills is tracked and periodically reassessed to ensure the skills are retained. The ALL software allows you to create an unlimited number of students and work through the entire sequence of skills at the appropriate pace for each student. Customize instructional modes and plan lessons for small groups, one-on-one, or assign students to independently complete lessons. The options are endless and the outcomes are high. ALL is compatible with iOS for iPad (not compatible with iPad 1).

Powered by AI, GoTalk About It! creates topic-specific displays automatically from photographs to support communication and language learning for non-speaking individuals, their families, and speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Choose a photograph, and in a few seconds GoTalk About It! will create a topic-specific display containing vocabulary symbols (pictograms) related to the input photograph! Topic-specific displays are a single page containing all relevant vocabulary to discuss a certain topic or activity. Users can then select vocabulary to create sentences using synthesized speech. GoTalk About It! is fully customizable: ~> You can edit the topic display created to add or remove words, or select a better symbol for a specific word. ~> You can change the size of all elements in the interface. ~> You can choose the complexity of vocabulary generated automatically. ~> You can program familiar people to enable QuickPic to automatically recognize them when creating new boards. GoTalk About It! was designed by a team of experts (PhDs and CCC-SLPs) in the field of speech-language therapy and human-computer interaction (HCI) using user-centered design methodologies, which involved the participation of end-users in the process. *** Development of this application was partly supported by the App Factory to Support Health and Function of People with Disabilities funded by a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to the Shepherd Center (Grant # 90DPHF0004) *** Created by Mauricio Fontana de Vargas (PhD), Howard Shane (PhD), and Christina Yu (CCC-SLP).