Note: This post has been updated.
All I want for Leo and his also-autistic friends is a simple, smart, well-designed social stories app for around $3.99. But as of now, it doesn't exist. I don't understand why it doesn't exist.
Social stories are incredibly useful tools for folks like Leo: they use clear, focused language and pictures to help an autistic person better understand potentially stressful scenarios, and provide realistic expectations and options. They can be especially helpful for travel, holidays, establishing routines, transitions, or visits to new and unfamiliar places.
We used to make custom social story books for Leo, sometimes through iPhoto or Shutterfly, sometimes just a bunch of printed pages stapled together. But with iDevices and tablets, we now have social stories apps -- which take the social story concept one step farther, with voiceover. On his iPad, my pre-reader Leo can "read" his social stories independently. It's really damn cool, not to mention empowering.
Here's a iPad story we made for Leo two summers ago, detailing one of our family's weekly routines:
Great, right? Absolutely. But you know what is not great and has long made me grumble? The featured app, Stories2Learn, costs $13.99. Its competitor, Pictello, costs $18.99. [updated to add: Pictello features text-to-speech, which is very different than simple voiceover recording, and affects the price point considerably. For more info, see comments.] Similar apps -- like the special education-oriented, custom-content and voiceover-enabled
Word SLaPps and Injini's
Write My Name -- are $4.99 and $1.99* respectively. Why the price differences? Some of the higher-priced apps are more complicated than the lower-priced apps, but not all. What explanation, then, other than that ever-lingering
special needs penalty cost?
With the front-runner social story apps offering more features than many users require, and costing more than many users are used to paying, there's an opportunity for someone else to capture a large, under-served, enthusiastic, loyal, and value-conscious audience. So, what should a potential social stories app developer keep in mind?
To work for Leo and his friends, here are the only functions a social stories app needs:
- Create/edit story button on home page
- Upload photos
- Enter custom text
- Record voiceover
- Page through stories by swiping and/or tapping a button/arrow
- Save stories as graphic icons with text titles, in list or folder format, and place them on the home page.
- (Optional) Share/upload stories, e.g., to use at school and at home
The interface needs to be smart and simple, in terms of available choices and steps. Any features more elaborate than the list above could be superfluous and confusing -- I just want to make the stories, and Leo just wants to read them. Though a discreet info button for parents/educators/caregivers/authors also wouldn't hurt, in terms of advising about language to use -- short, action-oriented phrases, if-then statements, avoiding pronouns, etc.
Potential developers should look at the striking UIs and graphics of (again)
Injini, a company that is in my opinion the industry standard-bearer for simple, elegant, engaging, thoughtful, useful, special needs-friendly kids' app design. Honestly, I'd love to see what Injini could do with a social stories app -- especially as there's no reason the app would need to be limited to the special needs market. Developers could make an app called "My Stories About Me" or some such, and parallel-market it to families of toddlers and preschoolers as a way to connect with family and friend by making stories together or for each other, which would have the extra benefit/hook of reinforcing those reading skills.
I know that folks like
Russ Ewell and
Pamela Sloan-Bradbury are looking into developing social stories apps. They both participated in
October's Hacking Autism event, where we all observed not one but two groups focusing on social stories -- so I suspect Pamela and Russ are already on the right track, and I have faith they'll do the right thing. I just want them to do it faster!
I want a well-designed, affordable social stories app for Leo, and I want it now. I hope someone will step up.
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And speaking of social stories apps ... you know what I never want to see again? I never want to see a developer make a choice that completely disregards their users' needs. I'm looking at you, Stories2Learn. Your software upgrade obliterated all of Leo's beloved social stories without warning, stories we'd spent months creating, stories that
he returned to for comfort and reassurance and nostalgia on a near-daily basis.
I can recreate those stories somewhat, but as Leo has remarkable visual recall and super-precise hearing, he can tell that the new stories are not the same -- especially as some of the original stories' voiceovers were recorded by non-local visiting friends and relatives so Leo wouldn't miss them so much once they went home.
It's been a few months since the stories disappeared, and I am no less furious than I was upon first discovering they were gone -- especially since Leo is still plaintively paging through the Photos folder where the original social stories apps photos are kept, hoping they'll somehow magically reassemble into the stories he'll never be able to experience again, and misses so much.
I understand that it is not always possible to keep all original features and content when developers upgrade apps -- I'm a former software producer, so I've been in that position myself. But then I didn't make software specifically for kids like Leo, who have so few tools for creating routine and predictability; I didn't wrench away some of those kids' best tools for making sense of this utterly confusing and overwhelming world. Leo and his social stories-loving peers aren't interested in or in some cases aren't able to conceptualize the explanations why their social stories disappeared, they just know that their stories are gone, and they're devastated.
It was a bad choice to let the Stories2Learn upgrade delete existing social stories. A bad decision not just for financial reasons -- customers may have a hard time trusting you again -- but for compassionate ones. I am extremely disappointed.
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*Please note that app prices change all the time. These prices are accurate as of today.