How to build a communication board people actually use

A communication board is a grid of words somebody points at. That is the whole mechanism. Everything that makes one good or useless happens before it is printed, in the choice of words and the size of the squares.

Start from what already happens

Watch for a day and write down what the person already gets across without words: reaching, pushing away, going to a door, handing you a cup. Those are the meanings that already exist and already work. A board that names them is being learned from the first pointing; a board full of words nobody has ever needed is being learned from nothing.

Small words carry more than nouns

Boards fill up with nouns because nouns are easy to picture. The trouble is that a noun says one thing and only in one situation. More, stop, go, help, want, finished, again, not, you and me work in the kitchen, the car and the waiting room, and they combine.

A practical split for a first board: mostly those small words, a handful of names of actual people, and only the nouns that come up most days for this particular person. Then leave spare cells blank on purpose, because the words you find out you need in week two are the ones worth having.

Keep the layout still

Pointing gets fast when a word is always in the same place. If you reprint the board, add to the empty cells rather than resorting everything into a tidier order. Tidiness costs the person the map they had built.

Size it for the hand, not for the paper

Fewer, bigger cells beat more, smaller ones. Someone pointing with a whole fist, or with poor accuracy, or across a room, needs squares that survive a near miss. If the words will not fit at that size, that is information: print two boards for two situations instead of one board nobody can hit.

Our builder works cell size out from the page, the margins and your grid, and warns you when a cell edge falls under one inch — a printed-size sanity check, not a recommendation for any person. What one person needs may be several times that.

Photographs of the actual thing

The tool ships no symbols at all. The well-known open pictogram libraries each carry their own licence with attribution and non-commercial conditions that have not been cleared here, and shipping something we cannot licence would be a legal problem rather than a feature. So every cell can carry a clearly marked empty image slot instead.

That constraint turns out to work in your favour. For one specific person, a photo of their cup, their bathroom door and the support worker who actually comes on Thursdays is easier to recognise than a generic drawing of a cup, a door and a person. Text-only boards are also used widely and work on their own.

Colour is a convention, not a rule

Cells can be tinted by word class — people, actions, describing words, social words, things. Several conventions exist and they contradict each other, so the tool prints its key alongside the board rather than asserting that its colours are the correct ones. If the person already uses a board with different colours, match that one or turn tinting off. Consistency with what they know beats consistency with anything published.

Modelling beats teaching

Point to the words yourself while you talk, for weeks, expecting nothing back. That is how the board stops being a test and becomes a way of talking. Pointing at a word and then waiting for the person to prove they understood turns the board into an exam, and exams get avoided.

Printing one

The communication board builder takes a grid from one by one up to eight by eight, your own word list separated by commas, new lines or bars, or a starter set you then edit. It gives you a print-ready sheet and a plain-text copy of the same board, made on your device.

Labels auto-fit: the font steps down, then wraps onto two lines, and if a word still will not fit it is shortened and listed in a note underneath, so you always know. Extra labels past the grid size are dropped and reported rather than silently binned. It is a board maker and not a clinical tool: it does not assess anybody, does not choose vocabulary for an individual, and does not replace a speech and language therapist.