Monday, September 9, 2013

#AppMondayTAS - Symbol Support

Each week I will be featuring an app from BridgingApps.org.  These apps are features in the Bridging Apps newsletter each week and are reviewed by Speech Pathologists, Occupational Therapists, and Special Education Teachers.  Come back each week for a new review.  If you’d like more information on how to use the BridgingApps.org website, or to find more app reviews, please click here.

Attainment's Symbol Support - $59.99 (Universal)




Reviewer Comments

SymbolSupport is an excellent app to be used as a reading and communication support for someone who needs symbol support to read and comprehend. This is an app that an adult/caregiver would use to create documents with symbols for someone who cannot read words or needs symbols to help them comprehend what they are reading.
SymbolSupport allows you type any text, and it adds symbols to each word as you type. The app comes with two symbol libraries: GoTalk Image Library and Slater Symbols, and then you also have the option of using images from your photo library.
When creating a document you have a variety of setting options. You can choose if you want the symbols on the top and bottom, if you want it to automatically symbolize the text or if you want to choose which words have symbols. You can choose if you want the parts of speech to be different colors and what colors you want. Each of these settings is set for that document only, so each document you create can be very individualized.
Along with these settings it also gives you “details” about the document such as, sentence count, word count, and grade level. You can also turn on the "read only" setting so that once you are done creating the document, the person using the document can not make changes on it. Once the document is finished and ready for the user you have more options. You can have it read aloud to the user and/or you can have it highlight each word as it is read. These options have to be turned on in your iPad’s general settings. You can also share this document via wireless or as an image through email.
There is also another app called SymbolSupport Viewer App. This app can receive, read, store and print documents that have been created in the SymbolSupport App but it can not edit the documents. So if you and the person who will be reading the documents each have your own iPad, you could have the full version of the app on your iPad and he/she could have the support app so you can then create the documents on your app and then share it with him and he can read it through the support app.
This feature would especially helpful to a teacher whose students have their own iPads. The teacher would need the full version but the students could just have the viewer app, and they would be able to receive any documents the teacher created. The teacher could create one document on her iPad and then share it with all of her students. (And the best part is that the viewer app is free!)
You can make your document as simple or complex as you want, so this app could be used for children/adults of all levels and abilities. The full version app also comes with a detailed and user friendly “User’s Guide” that is easy to access at anytime while creating document. Also be sure to check out the screen shots because that will give you a visual for what the documents will look like.
Mobile Devices
Assistive Traits
Assistive/Independent
iTunes Categories
BridgingApps Categories
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