iPad Apps for Vision Therapy – Part 3: Special Needs

Thanks once again to our visionhelp.com colleague, Dr. Carole Hong, for more leads on great apps.  In Part 2 I focused on children with visual impairment.  In this part I’ll feature some additional apps for children with special needs.  If you have any personal favorites to add, feel free to suggest them in the comments section.

Here’s one particularly well-suited for children on the Autistic Spectrum called Emotion Detective.  As we’ve discussed previously, reading social cues is challenging in part because of issues related to eye contact, theory of mind, mirror neurons, sharing joint attention, and central coherence.  This app presents scenarios in graphic as well as with real photography, and has visual as well as verbal cues.

Here’s a fun one for letter identification and reading readiness skills with gorgeous graphics called Reading Raven HD.

Here’s a very nice one developed by an OT called Ready to Print.  In my seminars with OTs/PTs/SLPs/Educators (and I’m on my way to do one this morning) – I discuss areas of common interest and overlap.  This is an example of one that uses some common principles from developmental optometry and sensory processing/integration in terms of visual motor planning, visualization, visual analysis, and visual guidance.

There are many other good ones, so visit the special needs site and you’ll see what a nice cross section of learning opportutnities there are.  Lastly, here is a site for free apps particularly well suited to pre-schoolers.