Math can be difficult enough for many of us (this author included), but imagine what it’s like for children with disabilities who ALSO struggle with basic math concepts? Imagine you are trying to learn the fundamentals of math in grade 1, and you cannot fully see the equations that you are being asked to solve. Today, we’re going to look at an app that seeks to solve that very problem, and it does so for free!

Math Melodies is a free app for iPad that uses audio cues to introduce and practice math concepts that are traditionally taught and tested on paper. Users can choose between a ten-chapter story mode, or they can choose between a variety of exercises that cover concepts learned between 1st and 5th grade. Each exercise also gives the option of choosing between base and advanced level lessons.

There’s quite a variety of concepts to learn within the app, including:

• Absolute Positions
• Addition
• Counting
• Compared
• Complete in column
• In out table
• Insert or delete
• Relative positions
• Sequences
• Subtraction
• Sum in table

Once you’ve chosen a lesson and your preferred difficulty level, you’ll be ready to view and complete the exercise. Next, you can press the speaker button on the right-hand menu to have the equation read aloud. But here’s where we’re going to stop you for a moment and ask that you do something else instead. Sure, you can choose to use the in-app read aloud function, but there’s one problem: it doesn’t work that well, and certainly it doesn’t come close to matching the built-in VoiceOver feature for iPad.

Rather than doing that, we encourage users to simply use the built-in VoiceOver feature, which happens to work especially well with this app. To begin VoiceOver, simply drag two fingers down from the top of the screen, and the VoiceOver menu will appear and the contents of your screen will be read aloud.

Once the correct answer has been identified and correctly chosen, a pleasant melody will play, and you can move on to the next problem. It’s a fairly straightforward concept, but to be completely transparent, the app itself isn’t perfect, with limited user options and a lack of overall polish. But, when you combine this free app with the built-in features that make the iPad such a powerful assistive technology tool, the end-result is a competent math app that could make all the difference for students with visual disabilities.

Learn more about Math Melodies.

This post originally appeared on the AT Help Desk website.

Tags: apps, assistive technology, AT HelpDesk, Atlantic Regional Office