ARASAAC

Also called Aragonese Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, ARASAAC pictograms

A free symbol set from the Government of Aragon in Spain, licensed for anyone to use without payment, and used across the world.

What it is

ARASAAC is a set of many thousands of picture symbols, called pictograms on its own site, produced by the Aragonese Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, a service of the regional government of Aragon in north-east Spain. It has been published since 2007 and it is free: the symbols are released under a Creative Commons licence that lets anyone use, print and share them for non-commercial purposes as long as the source is credited and derived works carry the same licence.

The style is a clear coloured drawing with a black outline, somewhere between the realism of PCS and the plainness of Widgit, and there are black-and-white and high-contrast versions of most symbols. The vocabulary is translated into dozens of languages, English among them, and it includes a good deal that the commercial sets are slow to add, because users request symbols and the ARASAAC team draws them.

Its existence changes the economics of symbols for families. A person who has no licence to anything can have a full symbol vocabulary tonight.

Who it can help

Families, small services and individuals who need symbols and have no budget; teachers in schools without a site licence; charities producing resources; and developers of free AAC software, who could not exist without an open set.

It also helps bilingual families, since the same symbol carries a word in Spanish, English, Arabic or Polish, and a board can show two languages at once.

It is not the right choice where the person has already learned another set and the goal is continuity, and its non-commercial licence means a company selling a product cannot simply bundle it; that limitation is deliberate and the ARASAAC site explains what needs permission.

How it works

The whole set is searchable and downloadable from ARASAAC, symbol by symbol or in bulk, and the site has free tools for making boards, timetables, calendars and symbol-supported documents online. Several free and open AAC apps, and the Global Symbols board builder, offer ARASAAC as a built-in set.

The licence is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. In plain words: use it, change it, share it, credit the author and ARASAAC, do not sell it, and pass on the same freedom. A school, a family, a charity and an NHS ward are all within that. A company selling boards is not without asking.

Symbols are numbered and stable, so a board made today can be rebuilt in years to come from the same symbol IDs.

Getting started

Go to ARASAAC tonight, search for the twenty words the person needs most, and print them at a size they can see. Laminate them if you can. Put the core words on one board and the day's timetable on another. Credit the set on the back; the licence asks for it and it costs nothing.

Then look at the online board maker on the same site, which will lay out a grid for you, or use Global Symbols for the same job with a choice of open sets.

If the person will move on to a device, tell the assessing therapist which symbols they have learned, so the device vocabulary can be matched or the change managed.

Where to get help

ARASAAC itself, which has an English interface and answers licensing questions directly. Global Symbols hosts ARASAAC alongside other open sets and its Board Builder. Open AAC explains the case for open symbol sets and software. For which set to choose for a particular person, Communication Matters and your speech and language therapist.