My son loves Slide 2 Unlock. I never showed the app to him, but he found the little icon and started playing around with it. It’s a game in one sense. But it’s meant to teach a certain motor skill. Specifically, Slide 2 Unlock is meant to help people with motor skills challenges practice and successfully master the skills needed to unlock an iPad.

Why is this important? Because you gotta be able to unlock an iPad to access it. This app is a nice step toward making the iPad, a mainstream product, accessible to more people. Apple built-in several great accessibility features, but they didn’t build-in a way for people to practice the skill of unlocking it.

My son, born in 2002 and has autism, already knows how to unlock an iPad so this app isn’t targeting kids like him. It’s targeting kids and adults with greater motor challenges, who may have to really concentrate in order to unlock and use an iPad, or any multi-touch interface for that matter.

Is it fun? I think my son would testify that it’s fun. And that says something. RJ Cooper cleverly disguised a task as a game.

There are six different levels to this game. Each progressively more difficult than the last. Level six is essentially unlocking the pseudo iPad by sliding the finger from left to right.

On any given level a swipe of the finger from left to right, at any speed, causes the app to elicit a sound that gets higher in pitch until the finger slides far enough right. The sound is pleasant. It’s like something you might expect to hear if you were adjusting the strength of the tractor beam on the USS Enterprise. It’s a cool sound and it surely interests my son.

When you successfully slide your finger far enough to the right a little graphic pops up and an encouraging sound is heard to reward you. That keeps my son, and other folks, coming back for more. The graphic is a little cheesy, and not in HD, but that won’t bother children. Trust me, my son hasn’t complained about it once. Haha!

As I noted toward the top, Slide 2 Unlock is meant to teach the simple motor skill of swiping your finger on the screen. It does that, and it does that well. And although my son is not among the population that needs this app, there are plenty of people who would benefit from it.

Switching between screens often elicits a “Loading” screen that stops you in your tracks for a couple seconds. It’s a minor annoyance, but worth mentioning.

RJ Cooper is known for developing hardware supports for people with special needs. If he keeps developing apps like Slide 2 Unlock he may become known for his software supports as well.