Special iApps - Expert Impact

Beverley Dean,

Special iApps

Met with John Frieda

At Special iApps, we develop educational apps for children with special educational needs, including autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, hearing impairment and other learning disabilities.

Beverley and Colin Dean founded Special iApps in 2011, as a non-profit social enterprise. We couldn’t find the apps we needed to teach our younger son William, who has Down syndrome and autism. He’d had several medical setbacks since being born in 2005, and his hearing, speech and co-ordination weren’t very good.

We found that most apps had too much going on in the background, weren’t configurable or easily personalised, and didn’t cater for William’s limited finger skills.

As we had worked for many years in education and IT, Bev suggested we develop our own apps! Colin left his university job, and our elder son Joseph lent us his voice for the sound recordings.

Our apps are different, because they are uncluttered, don’t have in-app purchases or adverts, and can be configured and personalised to suit your child. We say that our apps enable errorless learning, in small steps, without distractions.

We work very closely with parents, teachers, speech and language therapists, and many other professionals. We trial our apps, and improve them based on feedback from people like you.

You can download our apps for iOS or Android now, or visit our website (link above) to find out more.

Talking to John was fantastic, it felt more like 5 minutes than an hour and he touched on so many things that I could take away and look into straight away. He hit the nail on the head and got to the point very quickly, understanding my challenges and suggesting ways I can break through. John has clarified my next steps as his experience developing and selling his own brand is transferable to how we can promote and sell our apps and have a bigger impact.

Beverley Dean, Founder of Special iApps

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