Speech - Language - Communication - Different forms of AAC - Part 2

What is Avaz?

Avaz is an AAC App for children autism to help build communication skills. Avaz is designed with a focus to make speech therapy more effective, develop the child’s language and improve his indent to communicate. Avaz uses picture, symbols and high-quality voice synthesis to help users create messages and develop language skills. Avaz seamlessly integrates a powerful keyboard to help users transitioning to text. Avaz can be used for non verbal and verbal kids to improve their communication skills, build more compression skills and to teach academics.

Q.How to Start with Avaz?

Ans. Avaz should introduce to build communication skills first. If your child is in the first phase of PECS, you can introduce Avaz and can move forward with the same steps how I was explaining for PECS. Building spontaneous communication is the most important thing.

Q. Which is most important in this process?

Ans. Customization and using it consistently

In the above video I am showing how I customised Avaz for Addu. As I mentioned earlier Addu was in the fourth phase of PECS and so you can see I want sentence in the home screen and different categories like food, place, rhymes etc.

But when you are introducing,you should start with only two pictures in the screen. And you have to increase number of pictures one at a time and do the same steps regarding distance too, as I discussed in PECS. when the child reached in the fourth phase you can add I want and different categories.

http://smrithyrajesh.blogspot.com/2018/03/paper-presented-in-national-conferance.html

This is my research paper that I presented in the National Conference in January regarding How I built communication skills using assisstive technology.

Note: All the steps that I am mentioning about Avaz is created by me. When I started using Avaz, there was no information regarding how to use it with our children. So I started in my own way and I showed it to various professionals . Then they suggested to present it as a paper and I did it..

Q. When you can use Avaz to teach academics?

Ans: when the child started communicating spontaneously for their needs , you can use it in different ways. Till that you have to use it only for communication.

These are the steps I followed

Step 1: Communication using Avaz

Step 2: Counting using 'Avaz'

Step 3: Counting with 'Avaz' using pictures

Step 4: Teaching prepositions in,on

Step 5: Story time with Avaz

Step 6: Typing alphabets in Avaz keyboard with out visual clue

Step 7: Typing simple sentence using Avaz keyboard

Step 8: Typing in Avaz touch screen by copying

Step 9: Typing words in Avaz keyboard

Step 10: Typing simple sentence using Avaz keyboard

Step 11: Reading, identification and typing

Step 12: Picture to word matching using Avaz

Step 13: Teaching Yes and No concepts using Avaz

Step 14: Adjectives in sentence level using 'Avaz '

Step 15: Preparing for train and flight journey using Avaz