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What Was New for Speech Therapists in iOS 11

📅 May 15, 2022⏱️ 2 min read

🗂️This article is from 2017, when iOS 11 came out. iPads have changed a lot since, but many of these features are still around.

In this article

iOS 11 removed many outdated apps from the App Store, which made shopping for good apps easier.
The dock and app switcher made it easier to move between apps during a session.
Notes gained a document scanner, and Siri could translate words for bilingual SLPs.

iOS 11 apps update is here and it is one highly anticipated release. For us, as developers, it is always nerve-wracking as some iOS versions are always known to cause new bugs and changes to the apps. However, we are always excited to move forward. Let’s explore some features of iOS 11 that may bring great joy to our fellow speech therapists.

Many apps will not display on the app store! It was about time!

This is one of the main features of iOS 11 that makes me excited as a developer who is constantly taking care of all our apps. We update our apps often, something that is becoming a rare event among speech therapy and special education apps on the App Store. Unfortunately, having old apps full of bugs ruin the experience for many people, who in turn become frustrated with using the iPad and apps in general. Fortunately, many developers will either be flushed out of the app store or forced to update their apps in order to stay on the app store and to run on devices that run iOS 11.

This will hopefully make the options better once you are out there shopping for apps.

A better app store experience

Since we started making apps, everyone always wanted to know more about the apps. The redesigned App Store may make discovering new apps easier. Developers are allowed to add some featured text to their apps too.

Switch between apps more easily

If you use multiple apps during a session, you will be happy to know that it got even easier to allow your students to use multiple apps at the same time. On previous iOS versions, you would double-tap to navigate the apps backward, now once you double-tap you can see four of the most recent apps and switch between them. This way you can have your articulation app and possibly a game app and go back and forth between them with ease.

Rearrange multiple apps at once with iOS 11 apps update

If you enjoy rearranging your apps and organizing them in folders until iOS 11 apps update we had to do that one by one. Now we can tap and hold one icon then tap on additional icons to add them to the pile to be re-arranged.

Scan Documents with the notes app

We love pdf files and documents! I used several different scanning apps, now apple offers a free pdf scanner within the notes that will allow you to scan your pdf documents and add them to your notes and files on your device!

Use Siri to translate into a few languages

If you are a bilingual SLP, you may love this new feature. Just ask Siri “How do you say XYZ in Spanish?”. This is an incredible way to help us remember specific vocabulary that we always seem to forget.