Starter board sizes

Public AAC seeds every new person with the Universal core board: the 36-word Universal Core vocabulary from Project Core (Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill, CC BY), in the same 6×6 layout as their printed materials — so the board matches what a school or SLP may already be teaching with. If that’s too dense to start with, two smaller presets carry a subset of the same words:

Preset	Grid	Best for
First words	2×3	The very first taps: want · more · help · go · stop · not
Small core	3×3	Early phrase-building (“I want”, “want more”, “finished”)
Universal core	6×6	The full 36-word vocabulary, Project Core’s layout

Most words show a picture symbol from the open Mulberry Symbols set (CC BY-SA); a few function words (he, she, you, it, and a handful of others) stay text-only where no clear picture fits — the label still speaks. Any button’s picture can be changed in edit mode.

Where to pick a size

• Step 2 of Quick setup, the first-run wizard (“How many buttons?”).
• Setup → People, in the Start from selector when adding a new person.

Quick setup, step 2: pick a starting size.

Every word on a smaller preset is on the bigger boards too, so moving up a size never loses vocabulary someone has learned. Why boards lead with words like want and more instead of nouns: see What is a core words board?.

CommuniKate 20 (downloadable)

Both pickers also offer CommuniKate 20, a complete 96-board pageset with symbols and topic pages (by Kate McCallum, CC BY-NC-SA). It downloads about 13 MB once when selected, then works offline like everything else. Selecting it while offline fails with a plain message and creates nothing; try again with a connection.