My Autism Insights

Zacbrowser Review

I learned from a couple of sources that there is a new browser created especially for autistic children called ZAC - Zone for Autistic Children. I downloaded and tested the available beta version and also let my five year old at it. Gus was at school, but they have similar abilities and interests when it comes to the computer, so she’s a good enough stand in for him. We’ve tried a similar product, Kidzui , which they enjoyed a great deal, but there’s a monthly fee for it, which I can’t really spare at the moment. Right now, ZACbrowser is free, so there was nothing to lose by trying.

Visually, the site is great: no ads, nice big universally understandable icons. My daughter isn’t quite reading yet, but she was able to identify the television, games, music and story icons. She wanted to start with the stories, which brings me to the biggest difficulty we had with the browser. The load times were very slow. Initially, I thought it was my computer, but I also downloaded the browser to my laptop and it was about as slow there too. For a child who has a short attention span or trouble waiting, this could be frustrating. It could also be due to a huge amount of traffic because of the newness of the site, so this may just be a temporary issue.

Once she picked a story, we got no audio - it would only be appropriate for a child who can read. Other stories were fine. The buttons to switch to other pages (i.e. on Disney and Noggin sites, you can click to see other games and stories featuring different characters) and that upset her. Since my kids are pretty adept at navigating through the different sites, they are used to being able to experience all the characters, not just one. The irony is that having them unable to do things like print or click on buttons that would lead to ads is really a great idea. I don’t know how many times they’ve clicked on a button by accident, navigated away from the desired page and yelled, “We internetted!!” That’s their word for having a computer problem. It’s actually extended to life away from the PC. TV goes out, it internetted.

It would be great if there were a happy medium between disabling the really problematic things while allowing a bit more flexibility.

I was unable to check out the television feature because it was taking so long to load, I actually got annoyed.

Another feature I missed was the ability to web-surf. With Kidzui, my son could go look up things about the planets if he got tired of playing games or he was able to use it when he had a report due for school (yes, at seven, but I won’t even get into that). He’s autistic, but still quite adept at using a computer. So having that ability in ZACbrowser would be nice for older autistic students.

Overall, this is a new product, so I expect that it will be refined many times over. So far, while not perfect, I think it’s mostly a wonderful idea. I’ll be keeping an eye on it. I recommend that you do the same!

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