"APRIL SPEAKS" FINAL REPORT

Abstract

The April Speaks project aims to transform the traditional Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) into a user-friendly digital application, empowering non-verbal children—particularly those on the autism spectrum—to express needs, emotions, and basic ideas more independently. By providing a customizable pictogram library and virtual sentence board, the app streamlines sentence construction and replicates core PECS practices in an intuitive touchscreen interface. Distinct user roles (Child, Parent, Specialist, Organization, Manager) tailor the experience for various stakeholders, ensuring that caregivers and therapists can manage content and view usage analytics. The solution uses text-to-speech to vocalize constructed sentences thus allowing other stakeholders to communicate with children in a more convenient way. Under Anara Sandygulova’s supervision, an external development team built the frontend and backend, while I performed Quality Assurance and Testing—implementing automated TestNG/Selenium suites and conducting manual UI/UX evaluations. Initial evaluations demonstrate over 80% pass rates in automated tests and have identified targeted UX refinements; full end-user testing is planned upon deployment of remaining features.