WHY THESE TOPICS?
Words for real
everyday conversations.
The Communication toolkit adds messages for being understood, using an AAC device, talking with people, telling news, making choices and asking about plans.
These are original pages informed by professional guidance and community experiences. They are not copies of a commercial vocabulary, and no speech therapist has endorsed these exact pages. Use them alongside your child’s usual communication system.
Discovery and everyday interests
Space, ocean animals, vehicles, travel and independence pages add concrete topic choices alongside comments, questions and preferences. Explore the collections and their sources →
Professional guidance
ASHA’s AAC Practice Portal supports meaningful, individualized vocabulary and communication across daily settings. Its guidance includes repairing misunderstandings, explaining AAC to unfamiliar partners, and combining everyday words with topic-specific vocabulary.
AssistiveWare’s communication-functions guide looks beyond requesting things to comments, questions, social interaction and other reasons to communicate. That informed the conversation, news and choice pages.
AAC Language Lab’s Let’s Teach Core and Teaching Core Words Across the Day connect communication with daily activities. Our toolkit offers optional ready-made messages; the child’s full vocabulary remains available for creating new sentences.
What people discuss in practice
In this Reddit discussion about AAC customization, participants describe adding relevant words to established vocabularies. In this discussion about expanding communication, participants discuss moving beyond requests and considering other communication functions.
Reddit posts are personal experiences, not verified clinical evidence or a survey of what most therapists build. We used them to identify practical questions and checked the broader approach against professional guidance.
Choose a ready-made toolkit
- Early years: two smaller pages for being understood and expressing choices.
- Ages 5–18: six 36-choice pages covering repair, device access, conversations, news, boundaries and questions.
- Teens: four 48-choice pages with more detailed conversation, news, repair and device-support messages.
Each group comes as one TouchChat file with linked menus. Choose by the communicator’s interests and access needs; age labels suggest context.
Choose a group →Researched September 6, 2026. The library cleanup removed the automatic “Not:” copies, corrected confirmed picture mismatches and added distinct cues for looking, liking and asking about an object. Concrete pictures and abstract symbols still need to be chosen with the communicator; this is not a clinical sign-off on every button. Group navigation and sentence-bar behavior still need confirmation on the intended device.