Exclusively for iPad
Scene Speak
You have a child with autism. You also have a picture of the dentist's office. Scene Speak can make that picture interactive with 'hot spots'. You set up the hot spots and get the scene prepared with sounds. Your little autistic kido can then touch different areas on the picture and hear something. That's what Scene Speak does! And, abra cadabra, your boy isn't so afraid of the dentist anymore. But don't stop there. With Scene Speak you can create 'pages' and put them into 'books'.
For someone like myself who's well-versed in Adobe PhotoShop I can do a lot with Scene Speak. It can become a communication app. It can teach an autistic kid colors, shapes, animals, and whatever else. It can be used to teach basic concepts like above, below, hot, cold. It can do social stories and emotions. I can create a silly scene with a duck operating a bulldozer inside a house! My son would get a real kick out of that.
If you don't know PhotoShop, no worries. Like I said, you can use your own pictures. OR you can find and use any pic from Google Images, all within the comfort of Scene Speak. The developer, Good Karma Applications, also gives you some nice professionally drawn scenes to use. Some of those scenes are drawings of the human body. Obviously, and wisely, the developer had it in mind that a non-verbal child could use this iPad app to tell a parent or doctor where it hurts. Smart! The doctor says, "Where does it hurt?" Your child can then touch the part of the picture indicating where it hurts... and hear it spoken too. Of course, you'd want to set up the hot spots on the image ahead of time and be ready for this.
You can record your own voice, or any other sound you want. Record a donkey braying so that your child can touch the donkey and hear a real animal sound! Alternately, you can type the words if you'd like to use text-to-speech instead. If you choose to use text-to-speech you can select from 5 voices. Personally, I like recording my own sounds though.
Scene Speak is pretty, and it's pretty darn functional too. It did crash on me a couple times while I was setting up a new scene and adding hot spots though.
The only thing I'd like to see with Scene Speak is support for VGA out so children could show a scene to their class at school!
I'll tell you, when in public my son makes more scenes than you want to know about. If you want to make a scene, any scene, then Scene Speak for iPad is for you!
