A language shouldn’t come with terms and conditions.

97 million people cannot rely on speech alone to be heard.¹ Many of them speak in symbols — and so does everyone who talks with them.

aac0 is a campaign to make symbol-based communication free to use — for everyone who speaks in symbols, and everyone who speaks to them.

It was started by two parents in Lublin. Our son is thirteen and talks in picture symbols; to reach him, any app, device or website needs a licence first.

The problem

In every language, you can say “water” without anyone’s permission. Except my son’s.

Our son learned to communicate with one symbol set. For him, each picture is a word. A different set, with different pictures, is a language he does not know.

Symbol sets belong to their publishers, and each licence sets its own terms: which app, which device, which website, which purpose. Anyone who wants to reach him outside the family — a school, a clinic, a public office, a court, a shop — first has to work out whether they are allowed to. Often they cannot tell, so they don’t.

This is not only about children. Adults who communicate in symbols meet the same barrier — with doctors, at work, in court.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities counts non-spoken languages as languages, protects communication by the means a person chooses, including augmentative and alternative communication, and requires that laws protecting intellectual property do not become an unreasonable or discriminatory barrier to disabled people’s access to cultural materials.

What we ask

WIPO member states — Standing Committee on Copyright, December 2026

Recognise symbol-based formats as accessible formats. The exception for persons with disabilities should cover reproducing symbols to communicate with a beneficiary, and should not be overridable by contract.

For people with intellectual disabilities, an accessible text is a text in symbols.

The European Union and Poland

Extend the disability exception to impairments of understanding, as Canada and Australia already do. In publicly funded AAC, require that a user’s vocabulary can be exported in an open format.

Today the exception covers print disabilities only, and a vocabulary built over years often cannot leave the app it was built in.

Symbol publishers

State plainly in your terms that using your symbols to communicate with an AAC user needs no licence — at home, at school, in messages, in public offices, courts, healthcare and services.

Teachers, clinicians and officials hesitate because they cannot tell where permitted use ends. One sentence in the terms would remove that doubt.

Longer term: symbol systems treated as language — the system free to use, the individual drawings protected by copyright.

Documents

UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities — Articles 2, 21 and 30(3)
What symbol publishers’ terms say — 12 publishers, verbatim quotes, archived copies
Openly licensed symbol sets — 6 sets and platforms

Contact

[email protected]

Aliaksei Smirnou and Katarzyna Smirnowa-Stankiewicz, Lublin, Poland.

Disclosure: Aliaksei also develops Telepon, a non-commercial AAC messenger for families. This campaign is independent of it.