Playground AAC Board for Eby Farm Playground

The Eby Farm Playground, located in Waterloo Park (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) was redeveloped as the first universal playground in the City of Waterloo, with accessibility as a key priority. As part of this redevelopment, Prof Daniela O’Neill and her students collaborated with landscape architect Stephanie Snow of Snow Larc Landscape Architecture and the City of Waterloo to design and install a custom Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) board for the playground.

AAC tools support and supplement communication beyond speech. Our goal with this board was to foster an inclusive community space where children and families with complex communication needs have the ability, autonomy, and confidence to communicate while they play.

The development process took place over more than a year, beginning as a PSY470 Pragmatic Language Development class project in Winter 2024 and later expanding into small directed studies seminar with a smaller group of four students: Olivia Vento, Maia Aurini, Catelyn Ritchie and Aimee Landry who saw the project through to its completion. Together, we explored applied fields and new empirical literature from developmental and cognitive psychology, speech-language pathology, AAC, alongside Daniela's expertise in children’s social pragmatic communicative development. We also benefited from the feedback and insights of AAC and Speech-Language Pathology experts and researchers internationally, including Dr. Cathy Binger (CCC-SLP), Dr. Blair Richlin (CCC-SLP), and Mallory Tomblin (MSc, SLP). We held a trial session at the playground in Fall 2024 to gather feedback from parents, community members, and children, which further helped shape the final proposed design. Some further small modifications were made following a review by the Grand River Accessibility Advisory Committee (GRAAC) and the Reconciliation, Equity, Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion (READI) committee. The Eby Farm AAC Playground board was officially installed in the park in Dec. 2025

My students and I carefully explored every aspect of the design process, from selecting core and fringe vocabulary to creating ope-access symbols and deciding how to arrange everything on the board. Each decision was guided by both research and real-world feedback to ensure the AAC board would be practical, engaging and accessible for all children and families enjoying the playground. You can see some of the key considerations and features of our playground board in the list below. We have compiled and documented all of this work in this openly available report which also includes an appendix with openly-available versions of all our symbols used: A university-landscape architect collaboration to develop an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) board for a city park playground: A full report of its design.  This report was provided to Snow Larc and the City of Waterloo.  (For more information regarding citing/using the report see information below.) We hope this resource, along with the openly shared symbols we developed, will support others designing AAC boards for playgrounds and public spaces. We also hope it will spur on more research in areas where we would have liked more research to support our decisions. 

Some of the most important aspects we considered as we developed the Eby Farm Playground AAC board included:

• selecting the most appropriate and functional vocabulary, balancing core vocabulary (frequently used words across many situations) and fringe vocabulary (more specific to the playground context)
• organizing the grid of cells to follow left-to-right English sentence structure, with pronouns and question words placed on the left and verbs and nouns on the right
• creating and using open-access symbols that are visually engaging and can be understood by both children and parents
• adapting the Modified Fitzgerald Key (MFK) colour system to be colour-blind friendly, and applying it to symbol borders according to word class for easier navigation
• positioning words vertically to align with age of acquisition and the physical layout of the playground, ensuring high-priority words (e.g., stop, help, toilet) were near the bottom within reach of younger children
• placing related or opposite words adjacent to each other (e.g., fast/slow, hot/cold) to support comprehension and navigation
• capitalizing on well-recognized and colourful emoji symbols to facilitate comprehension and use of a wide variety of physical and emotional state terms
• adding a smiley face scale paired with number line to support communication about feelings, preferences, and opinions
• designing a novel circular colour wheel, based on familiar and functional colours, to allow communication about clothing, equipment, and other everyday objects in the playground setting
• including simple but clear instructions to provide context about the board and prompt effective aided AAC modelling from communication partners