TouchChat HD- AAC w/ WordPower

My artistic son has used TouchChat with word power for several years. It is a robust, customizable, and user-friendly AAC option that has given our son a voice and a platform to share his voice on. However, recent iPad and app updates have left many bugs. Since the most recent iPad update, the app stops working. It’s opened, but when you press the icons nothing happens, leaving my son, the user, frustrated. When this happens, we have to delete the app, reinstall it, an import his customizable file. We have had to do this several times, and although simple, it is time-consuming, frustrating, and disheartening… Because it is another thing that is harder in our lives.

I like using. It’s useful as I cannot talk but since the last update the interrupt function has stopped working. So if you accidentally hit the speak button or speech display bar a second time you and whoever you are with has to listen to the whole message again. You can hit the home button and close the app but then when you come back to the app it will continue what it did not finish. Can you bring back the interrupt?

TouchChatHD is the first app I try with my nonverbal or limited verbal special education students. It’s very intuitive and helps reduce frustration by assisting navigation for new users. For example, if a person presses the eat button, it automatically (without extra programming) jumps to the food home page to select the food. It has lots of levels for all types of AAC users. My only complaints would be: 1)The vocabulary layout is not consistent across levels so that if a user is ready to progress to a level with more robust vocabulary and buttons, the layout of main buttons changes drastically, which makes the user relearn basic motor patterns. For example the “home” button may move from the bottom corner to the top corner or the “clear button moves from the lower bottom corner to the opposite top corner. 2) The app saves an image of the logo to the device’s camera roll every day the app is used. This is a minor annoyance, but I have never seen another app do this and it gets old deleting the logo every day.