You talk! - You vs autism

Abstract

This paper reports our work in developing a mobile application, which helps autistic children communicate with those around them, by using PECS symbols to formulate a sentence and later on speak it out loud. The appli-cation in question has gone through a rigorous development process: both the requirements gathering and evaluation for this project have been conducted with experts in the world of autism in order to further establish the soundness of the work. All the issues that were found throughout the evaluation, which was carried out as a cognitive walkthrough, were fixed and suggested additional functionalities were taken into consideration in order to enhance the application with more features. A user-based evaluation, which was conducted in order to further establish the validity of the work, proved that the application was well accepted by the autistic community in the virtual world. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.