Custom Boards Elite is the ultimate app powered by Smarty Symbols, designed to bring your therapy and classroom visual supports to life.
Whether you are building an interactive game, a weekly schedule, or an alternative communication board, we have a meticulously designed template ready for you.
Engage students with interactive learning materials designed for fun and retention.
Create perfectly sized overlays for the most popular AAC devices and switches.
Organize your classroom or therapy room with beautiful, clear visual labels.
Build standard AAC communication boards with highly flexible grid dimensions.
Provide structure and ease transitions with visual timelines and schedules.
Generate printable materials for fine motor skills, tracing, and comprehension.
Once you have selected the perfect template for your student, bringing it to life takes only seconds. Custom Boards is built from the ground up for the iPad, offering an intuitive, touch-first editing experience without any cluttered menus.
Simply tap on any empty placeholder cell on your canvas. A clean, quick-action menu will immediately appear, allowing you to add an image or customize the cell's borders instantly. It is the fastest way to build professional visual supports.
Say goodbye to scouring the internet for the right images. Custom Boards is fully integrated with a massive library of over 30,000 Smarty Symbols. Simply tap a placeholder, search for any word or concept, and instantly drop in high-quality, inclusive illustrations.
Looking for a specific articulation target? Filter symbols by initial, medial, or final sounds in seconds to streamline your therapy prep.
Learn more about Smarty Symbols images →
Don't waste time scrolling through thousands of images to find the perfect articulation words. Custom Boards features a powerful phonetic search engine tailored specifically for speech-language pathologists and special educators.
Filter the entire Smarty Symbols library by sound position—Initial, Medial, or Final—and select specific letters or blends to instantly populate your board games, bingo cards, and worksheets with targeted vocabulary.
Building effective visual supports shouldn't require hours of dragging, dropping, resizing, and formatting. Custom Boards Elite streamlines the entire process, allowing you to create professional, ready-to-use materials in just a few taps.
Explore a vast collection of built-in templates engineered to take the guesswork out of design. Whether you need a quick "First-Then" behavioral board (shown here), a multi-page communication grid, or a classroom label, simply select your layout, tap to insert a Smarty Symbol, and you are ready to print or use directly on your iPad.
Move far beyond basic communication grids. Custom Boards Elite includes a rich library of interactive templates designed to keep students motivated and focused during therapy sessions or classroom centers.
Easily populate themed worksheets, interactive board games, and custom bingo cards with your specific articulation targets or vocabulary words. Just tap the empty slots on templates like "The Fish" to instantly insert custom symbols, adjust cell colors, and create materials your students will love.
"Wonderful app with limitless opportunities. I can create games, homework and visuals in a matter of minutes. I don’t know what I would do without this app."
Never lose a carefully crafted visual schedule, bingo game, or communication board again. Custom Boards Elite features a powerful built-in Archive where all your creations are automatically saved and accessible anytime.
Keep your therapy materials meticulously organized by creating custom folders for individual students or specific clinical goals—you can even customize the folder icons using Smarty Symbols! With a dedicated search bar and sorting tools, finding, duplicating, or editing past materials for a new session takes only seconds.
While our library of 30,000+ Smarty Symbols is incredibly comprehensive, sometimes nothing beats a real photograph. Custom Boards makes it seamless to bypass the symbols and import custom images straight from your iPad’s camera roll.
Highly personal visual supports—like inserting a student's actual face into a "Mini Book" or showing real photos of their classroom in a daily schedule—are proven to increase engagement and comprehension. Just tap the camera icon to select, crop, and drop your own photos directly into any template.
Watch a quick walkthrough to see just how effortlessly you can design, customize, and print your visual supports.
A research study by Wilkinson, Carlin, & Jagaroo (2006) found that children are faster and more accurate in learning symbols when those symbols have unique internal colors.
That is why Custom Boards empowers you to change background colors on each individual cell, allowing for highly personalized, effective learning environments.
"The use of visual supports and symbols as receptive and expressive components of an AAC system has been established as an evidence-based practice for individuals with Autism Syndrome."
— Mirenda & Iacono (2009)
"Wendt (2009) found that the use of graphic symbols for requesting has the most extensive evidence base for people with ASD."
Whether you are running a busy clinic, structuring a classroom, or supporting a loved one at home, Custom Boards Elite is engineered to save you time and maximize your impact.
Create targeted articulation games, phonetic worksheets, and highly customized AAC overlays in the brief minutes between your therapy sessions.
Build an inclusive, predictable classroom environment with visual schedules, center labels, and behavioral supports that empower your students.
Essential for rehab nurses, occupational therapists, and neurologists needing immediate, custom visual communication tools for patient recovery and care.
Bring the therapy home. Easily create daily routines, "First-Then" boards, and visual rules to reduce anxiety and ease transitions for your child.
Join thousands of speech-language pathologists, special educators, and parents who are already saving hours every week. Create your first professional visual support in seconds.
“I have been a fan of this app for quite some time (as you will see in the examples below). Not only can you create your own materials from thousands of images and over 100 templates, but now you can SHARE your masterpieces between other owners of this app (their newest update). Although this app is a bit on the pricier Reviews: side, it’s well worth the cost! Consider it one-stop shopping for everything you need to quickly conjure up an unlimited number of games and activities.”
Cooking up Good Speech