Compatible with iPhone
and iPod Touch
SoundingBoard
Developed by AbleNet, SoundingBoard is an iPhone app in the category of AAC or Augmentative and Alternative Communication. Like most apps in this category you touch an icon/image and you hear the corresponding sound that's associated with that icon.
AbleNet did a great job of making SoundingBoard easy to use and edit. Competitors may pack in more features, but SoundingBoard seems to specialize in the necessary basics for communication and making sure that it's a tool you can use without hassle.
In fact, the things I like best about SoundingBoard are its stability and it's all around ease of use. I tried different things to crash this app and nothing brought it down. The code behind it appears to be solid. That's important, especially with an AAC app. I find its use to be very intuitive and straight forward whether editing a board or actually using it to be your voice. Anyone can figure it out. It's very easy to create your own boards and very easy to link them to other boards if you like. In fact, I think this app makes it easier than most of its competitors when it comes to making new boards. Having the board configurations laid out visually is pure genius.
SoundingBoard comes with several preloaded boards which can serve as a jump off point to help you get going. The preloaded boards are nice and very functional. Naturally, when making your own boards or editing the preloaded boards you can use your own pictures and record your own voice. There's also a nice search function when you're looking for an image in the default Symbols Library. In that library many of the images are nice, but some resemble internet clipart. Either way, it's there and ready at your convenience.
It's only a minor annoyance but, I noticed there's a little extra dead space at the end of all prerecorded audio for each icon on the preloaded boards. You can hear a little click after each of the recordings. Usually, clicks like these are due to overly sensitive microphones when the audio was recorded. This dead space causes you to think the audio is done, and therefore you move onto the next icon, but since the audio is technically not finished from the previous icon your next icon doesn't make a sound. It makes you be a little patient and even touch the next icon again. But, hey, patience is a virtue right?
Oh, and SoundingBoard supports switch scanning! If your child has greater motor skills challenges and needs to use a switch, AbleNet thought of you too.
The built-in help guide is handy, but you probably won't need it. AbleNet would be wise to make a slight change to the help guide. It would be nice if once you're in a certain part of that help section it could return you to the contents menu instead of bouncing you back to the main menu.
More importantly it would be nice if there was an option to have a home board or a board that, when the app was started, SoundingBoard would go directly to without presenting an options menu and making you choose a board each time. Depending on someone's cognitive level or their developmental stage, this is all the more important.
And since I'm on the topic of home boards, it would be really cool if this app were location aware and it loaded the appropriate board depending on whether you were at school, home, the bank, or wherever. I can't knock it for lack of location awareness, but if AbleNet really wanted to rocket this app toward the front of the pack location awareness would give it a real boost. Either way though, SoundingBoard needs to add the ability of having a home board. AbleNet also needs to hide the settings so younguns can't fiddle around and delete entire boards accidentally!
It would be great if you could swipe to go back to the previous screen too. As it is, you have to tap twice to get to the previous screen. If you were to make a more complex board you would find that it would be golden to have a button that let you go directly back to your home board without having to go back, go back, go back.
For what it does, within the limits of its available features, SoundingBoard does it well. Their visual configuration for layout of new boards would work particularly well on an iPad if they choose to make an iPad version of this app. Let's hope they do!
