Free tools for schools
Build your school's AAC capacity.
A device alone does not make a competent communicator. These five free tools help school teams look at what builds communication: the environment, the people, and the student's own skills, all of which come before any product decision.
Tool 1
Four Barriers Self Assessment
Rate your building across the four environmental domains of the Participation Model: policy, practice, attitude, and knowledge and skill. Get a prioritized capacity roadmap built from your answers.
Tool 2
AAC Roles and Admin Support
The five role AAC ecosystem for district service delivery, a checklist for naming who holds each role, plus a clarification on AT versus AAC evaluators, and a document you can generate naming who fills each role in your district.
Tool 3
Educational Evaluation Checklist
A skills based, feature matching checklist for school evaluations: document what the student can do, trace every feature and visual support to a finding, and generate brand free language ready for the IEP team.
Tool 4
Quick Screener
A favorite food becomes a set of find trials, real photographs only, alongside written word and association trials. Field size scales up to 100, layout, and no visuals probes round it out. This tool stands on its own for now, separate from the Educational Evaluation Checklist.
Tool 5
Capacity and Cost Snapshot
A mini Pulse: last year's evaluation, training, and consult volume plus your district's own cost figures, in district against out of district, so a capacity building decision rests on real numbers rather than a guess.
What guides these tools
- These are educational evaluations. A school based AAC evaluation answers an educational access question under IDEA (34 CFR Part 300) and, in Massachusetts, 603 CMR 28.00. Medical needs, home and community goals, and insurance documentation belong with outside providers, in collaboration with the school.
- Recommendations describe skills and features. Describe what the student needs at the level of function and access, so the tool can change as the student's needs change and the plan still holds if a family declines a specific product.
- No prerequisites. There are no readiness requirements for AAC. Teams start from presumed competence, the least dangerous assumption (Donnellan, 1984).
- The environment is often the biggest barrier. Every tool here scans the setting before it scans the student, because environmental factors are frequently bigger barriers than anything about the student.
Nothing you type here leaves your device. There are no accounts, no tracking, and no cost. Do not enter student names or identifying information; initials are enough.
Tool 1 · Four Barriers Self Assessment
Is your building operating as a barrier or a support?
The Participation Model (Beukelman and Mirenda; Beukelman and Light) asks teams to scan the environment across four domains before assessing any student. For each statement below, rate where your building or district is today. Your roadmap builds itself from the lowest ratings, because a barrier you can name becomes an action step.
Tool 2 · Roles and Admin Support
The AAC ecosystem: who does what, and what admin makes possible
AAC works when it belongs to the whole team and fails when a student only gets it with the SLP. This district level framework, from The Inclusive Practice AAC Roles and Responsibilities resource, names five roles so that no single person is the AAC expert for a student's communication.
Expertise flows down. Responsibility stays put. No role absorbs another's accountability.
Core principle · AAC Roles and Responsibilities · The Inclusive Practice
Quick decision guide: who handles it?
| Goes to the SLP / AAC interventionist | Goes to the consultant or specialist |
|---|---|
| Anything that touches communication | Operational edits to the device not tied to a goal |
| Speech, language, pragmatics, and social skills goals | Teaching a teacher or assistant how to use a specific feature |
| Expressive language and vocabulary programming | Parent training: charging, navigating, guided access setup |
| AAC evaluations and probing, for their own students | Coaching the interventionist through a new or complex evaluation |
| Modeling AAC use in the classroom | System specific skill trainings: editing, feature navigation |
| Team consults, all of them | Referrals, AAC policy, and resource development |
| Device adjustments tied to language needs | Professional development, in district or brought in from outside |
When in doubt: if it touches communication, it goes to the interventionist SLP who knows this student best.
Often confused
AT evaluator versus AAC evaluator, not the same role
AAC is one type of assistive technology, not a separate category (ASHA Practice Portal; 34 CFR 300.5 defines assistive technology devices broadly). The two evaluators answer different questions, and a student can need one, the other, or both.
AT evaluator
Evaluates the broader assistive technology need: positioning, seating, mounting, switch access, computer access, and environmental controls. Often an occupational therapist, physical therapist, or a dedicated AT specialist.
AAC evaluator
Evaluates communication specifically: language, symbol use, vocabulary, and feature matching for a communication system. The school based SLP, within SLP scope of practice; not outsourced by default.
Name every role
Check each role that has a named person in your district today. If a role has no name next to it, that is a gap to bring to administration.
Build your role assignment document
Write in who does this in your district beside each role above, then generate a one page document: every role, its responsibilities, and who fills it here today, ready to share or post.
Cost and capacity, in one place
Last year's evaluation, training, and consult numbers, plus a cost comparison between building this in district and paying for it out of district, now live in their own tool.
Pulse · a department of The Inclusive Practice
This page gives you a once a year picture, and it will always be free here. Pulse tracks the same information as it happens across the whole year: evaluations, consults, and training needs. When it is time to meet with your administrator, the data is already waiting.
Tool 3 · Educational Evaluation Checklist
Skills in, features out. Never a brand.
This guide walks a school team through a skills based, feature matching evaluation summary: what the student can do, what the environment is doing, which features and visual supports the findings point to, and starter language for the IEP team. Each feature recommendation should be justified by a specific assessment finding.
1 · Student snapshot
Current communication modes (check all observed)
Which of Light's four purposes of communication does the student's current system support? (Light, 1988)
If only wants and needs is checked, that is a finding: a system that only supports requesting is not yet supporting communication.
2 · Educational impact
Where does communication currently limit participation, compared to what peers do in the same moment? Starting with participation rather than technology is what keeps assessments honest.
3 · Environmental scan: the four domains
For each domain, is it currently operating as a barrier or a support for this student? Environmental factors are frequently bigger than anything about the student.
Want the building wide version? Run the
4 · Skills profile: what the student can do
Describe what the student can do, with specifics, rather than listing deficits. Assess literacy for every student, every time. No cognitive score determines whether a student gets access to communication.
Symbol understanding the student currently shows (check all with evidence)
5 · Feature needs, matched to findings
Choose only what the findings support, and write the finding next to each choice. The output flags any feature without a finding.
6 · Visual supports across the school day
Aided visual supports carry communication and participation beyond the primary system. Check what the findings point to and name where it lives.
7 · Accommodations starter set
Organized the way IEPs organize them: presentation, response, timing, setting, and training and consultation. When accommodations live in the evaluation, the IEP meeting adopts language instead of drafting it, and the recommendation survives staff turnover. Keep what applies; add student specific items.
Quick Screener
A first look, built around a favorite food
One anchor the student already cares about, a favorite food, becomes a set of find trials: photograph, written word, and something that goes with it. Every photograph trial compares real photos only, no generated images anywhere. Field size scales up to 100, layout, and no visuals probes round out the picture. This tool stands on its own for now, separate from the Educational Evaluation Checklist.
Set up the food
Add the food's name and one clear photograph. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and pictures clear when the page closes. Recorded results do save on this device. A plain background photographs best.
Comparison photos
Add real photos of other foods, from the lunchroom, a cupboard, or the fridge. Every trial and probe compares the target to real photos only, so add as many as you want to test with, up to a field of 100 in probe 1.
Probe 1 · Visual discrimination and field size
The food photograph appears among the comparison photos added in the setup card, which is why probe 1 needs at least one to start. The field grows each round, up to 100 with enough comparison photos. On this screen a larger field also means smaller targets, so motor access is tangled in; treat the result as a starting hypothesis and confirm it on candidate systems.
Probe 2 · Find trials
Three levels, two trials at each: photograph, written word, and the goes with card, asked for as "something that goes with it." The photograph trial compares real food photos only, so it is skipped until there are enough comparison photos ready.
Tool 5 · Capacity and Cost Snapshot
What AAC service delivery costs today, a mini Pulse
Administrators can protect time and fund training only for work they can see, and only for costs they can compare. Enter last year's numbers and your district's own cost figures to build a one page snapshot: what AAC service delivery costs today, and what it would cost built in district against paid out of district.
Volume, last year
External consultant cost
One hourly rate for the external consultant, applied to however many hours each service actually takes. Each cost multiplies by the volume already entered above.
| Service | Hours |
|---|---|
| AAC evaluations | |
| Training |
Leave any field blank if you do not yet know it. Evaluation and training hours multiply by the volume entered above; the total appears in the generated snapshot below.
Consultant or specialist role, in district against out of district
A separate comparison, not added into the total above: what an ongoing consultant or specialist role costs built in district, against what the same work costs brought in from outside.
The in district figure is a direct annual cost, since it is usually a known salary. The out of district figure is calculated from an hourly rate, since consultants are usually billed that way.
Research and grounding
Where every piece of this toolkit comes from
Nothing in this toolkit is invented here. The frameworks come from the AAC research base, federal and Massachusetts regulations, and the Educational AAC Guidebook and district resources by Rebecca Cann, CCC-SLP, The Inclusive Practice.
Frameworks
- The Participation Model (Beukelman and Mirenda; Beukelman and Light): assessment begins with participation and an environmental scan across policy, practice, attitude, and knowledge and skill.
- Four purposes of communication (Light, 1988): expression of wants and needs, information transfer, social closeness, and social etiquette.
- Communicative competence (Light, 1989; Light and McNaughton, 2014): linguistic, operational, social, and strategic domains, shaped by psychosocial factors and by environmental supports and barriers.
- SETT (Zabala): Student, Environments, and Tasks before Tools; tool questions become feature questions.
- The least dangerous assumption (Donnellan, 1984): presume competence; there are no prerequisites for AAC.
- Communication Bill of Rights (National Joint Committee for the Communication Needs of Persons with Severe Disabilities): communication is a basic right for every person, regardless of the extent or severity of disability. Read the current edition at asha.org/njc.
Evidence cited in this toolkit
- Millar, Light, and Schlosser (2006): AAC does not hinder speech; most participants gained speech.
- Romski et al. (2015): early access to AAC supports language development.
- Light and Drager (2012): visual scene displays place language inside the situation where it occurs, valuable for young and beginning communicators.
- Wilkinson, Carlin, and Thistle (2017): grid size and organization measurably affect symbol learning.
- Light and Binger (1998): strategy instruction, especially effective when the learner is an adult communication partner.
Full reference lists, chapter by chapter, live in the Educational AAC Guidebook. Author and year are given here exactly as cited there.
Regulations
- IDEA, 34 CFR Part 300. Assistive technology device and service are defined at 300.5 and 300.6 and must be made available if required for a free appropriate public education (300.105). Evaluations use a variety of tools and strategies rather than any single measure as the sole criterion, and include parent provided information (300.304). IEP teams consider the communication needs of the child and whether the child needs assistive technology devices and services (300.324(a)(2)(iv) and (v)). Read the current text at ecfr.gov.
- Massachusetts: 603 CMR 28.00. The Massachusetts special education regulations govern evaluation and IEP development for Massachusetts teams; document how communication supports help the student make effective progress. Read the current text through the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education at doe.mass.edu.
- When in doubt on AAC practice questions, the ASHA Practice Portal on augmentative and alternative communication is the professional reference point: asha.org/practice-portal.
Regulations change. Always verify current regulatory text at the official sources above before citing it in an evaluation or IEP.
Where this toolkit stops
- This is a planning and framework tool. It is not a clinical or diagnostic evaluation, and it does not replace one.
- It never names or recommends a product. A school evaluation should hold the same line, keeping recommendations at the level of features and skills.
- Nothing entered here is transmitted, collected, or stored anywhere beyond this device.
Built by Rebecca Cann, CCC-SLP, The Inclusive Practice, and offered free. Deeper implementation support lives in the AAC Educational Foundations Course and in Pulse.