Smart mobile devices have become daily necessities which we carry with us everywhere as just like our watches [1]. Alongside the wide use of mobile devices, developing almost everything as an app and using these apps on our mobile devices have become a growing trend, and assistive technologies are part of this trend to be designed as apps. In this chapter, I would like to discuss the current trend of developing assistive technologies in the forms of apps, taking the case of communication aids (or augmentative and alternative communication devices, AAC in short) as a lens.
There is a wide range of app products on app stores; nonetheless, there is a prevailing mode to design and develop apps. This prevailing mode consists of characteristics including developing and selling apps free or relatively cheap [2], designing apps to serve tiny simple tasks and these simple tasks are specifically design to be operated on iPads and similar mobile devices using conventional ways of operations like touch and swipe on a touch screen, using app stores as a platform to make transactions and a platform for app developers and users to interact. This mode of development is not just popular thoughts to design apps, but relying on and constrained by the materiality afforded by iPad and similar mobile devices and the platform of app stores.
This mode to design and develop apps is quite different from the traditional way to develop dedicated AAC devices and many other dedicated assistive technologies. In the traditional AAC industry, a small group of developers design and develop dedicated AAC devices to serve a small group of AAC users. These devices are often expensive, and users get assessed and access to the devices via medical professionals, where users can have their devices subsidised. Moreover, users are often trained and implemented to the use of their AAC devices for a period of time either by AAC suppliers or medical professionals, which is considered crucial for users to implement AAC devices into their daily lives. As a result, AAC developers are facing many difficulties or making adjustments when they follow the trend to develop AAC as apps, especially in the issues of prices, providing accessibility and choices of products. By analysing discourses provided by AAC developers and representatives from AAC companies, I argue that the trend of developing AAC as apps might lower the barriers for developers to enter the AAC industry and allow developers to distribute their products more easily. However, they face many difficulties when applying the prevailing mode of designing apps to develop AAC apps. Further, the difficulties AAC developers face or the adjustments they make could lead the development of AAC towards the logic of choice; that is, both developers and users focus too much on choosing a right product of AAC, and then overlook the crucial aspect of development and use of AAC, including training and implementation.
[1] I am the old school kind of person that I am still wearing a watch on my wrist. But when I wrote this sentence, I immediately thought of that many people are not longer using watches, but to be replaced by smart mobile devices.
[2] Unlike many traditional markets that developers and producers make profits from users, i.e. buyers, in the market of many digital products, developers and producers make profits from sponsor instead of directly from users. Apps are one such example, and this is part of the reason why many apps are free or cheap.
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