On Creating "Social Apps" for Autistic Kids

Photo © Shannon Des Roches Rosa
[image: Leo chilling in a medical office
lobby, with an iPhone and headphones.]

I don't do as much autism and tech advising as I used to do back in those frontier iPad days, but people still ask me about best practices for tech and autism, especially about apps and games for supporting autistic kids in the area of social skills.

And here is what I recommend: Tap into resources on how to create software and social approaches that actually help autistic kids, instead of trying to get those kids to conform to non-autistic social rules. It's not that learning the "hidden curriculum" (as Judy Endow writes) isn't important and useful, but it's that all the burden is usually placed on the autistic kids to change their behavior, when often they aren't doing anything wrong, just different, or for different reasons or perspectives.

Here are some starting materials, please feel free to suggest more:

• The entire Real Social Skills archive is invaluable on this matter, but I recommend a couple of post specifically:
• Identifying Bad Friends
• All Autistic People Are Disabled
• My 2015 International Meeting for Autism Research comments on autism and tech
• My presentation outline on iPads/tech for autistic kids/adults. (Note the autistic pushback against research insisting that screen time is bad.)
• Judy Endow on Hidden Curriculum