Autistic spectrum disorder; Down syndrome; mental retardation; VOKS; qualitative and quantitative pedagogical research; testing

The paper shows basic possibilities of using computers for education and support of communication skills. Children with specific disorders face communication difficulties and common ways are often unusable. The development of an application stemming from the communication system PECS (The Picture Exchange Communication System) and its Czech variant VOKS is the base of this paper to show specificity of the development and verification of software for the given group of handicapped users. The target user group requires a specific approach to development and testing of the created software. Thus, apart from common functional testing, quantitative and qualitative methods of pedagogical research were also used.