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ARASAAC symbols: what they are and how to use them

Most of the pictograms you have seen on communication boards, visual schedules and classroom labels come from one free library. It is called ARASAAC, it is made by a regional government in Spain, and it is why a free AAC app can ship 13,799 symbols without charging anyone.

What ARASAAC is

ARASAAC — the Aragonese Portal of Augmentative and Alternative Communication — is run by the Government of Aragón in Spain, through its education department. It publishes a pictogram library of well over 10,000 symbols in colour and black-and-white, along with vocabulary in many languages and a large catalogue of teaching materials contributed by its users. It has become the default symbol set for AAC across the Spanish-speaking world and much of Europe, and it is used in dozens of applications, including this one.

What the licence allows

ARASAAC pictograms are published under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. In practice, for the people who use them most:

• BY — attribute. Say where the symbols came from. Credit the author and ARASAAC wherever the material appears; this site does it in the footer of every page.
• NC — non-commercial. You can use them freely in therapy, in the classroom and at home, and you can give materials away. You cannot sell what you make with them. This is the clause that catches people who plan to put their resources on a marketplace.
• SA — share alike. Anything you build from them carries the same licence onward.

This is a plain-language summary, not legal advice — check the current terms on the ARASAAC site before publishing or distributing anything at scale.

How it compares to PCS and SymbolStix

PCS (Boardmaker) and SymbolStix are the two large proprietary symbol sets, and they are the ones inside most paid AAC apps. They are well made and extensively researched, and they are also licensed — which means they cannot leave the app that licensed them. That is the practical reason a board exported from a commercial app arrives somewhere else with its words but not its pictures. ARASAAC has no such restriction, so a board built on it can move between tools and outlive any one of them. Nobody's evidence says one symbol set is comprehensible to every learner; what is clear is that consistency matters far more than which set you picked.

Finding the right symbol

A symbol only works if the learner can connect it to the idea, and abstract words are where that gets hard — more, not, again and want have no obvious picture. Search by the concept rather than the exact word, look at several candidates before choosing, and prefer the one whose meaning is guessable without the label. And once a symbol is chosen for a word, leave it alone: swapping a picture a learner has already memorised costs more than an imperfect picture ever did.

Using them in SayThrough

1. Every word on every board already has one — nothing to download or assign.
2. Editing a button opens a searchable symbol picker covering the whole library, in the profile's own language, so a Polish board is searched with Polish words.
3. You can use your own photographs instead wherever a photo would be clearer — a specific person, their actual cup, the real front door.

What about Mulberry?

SayThrough's boards are built on ARASAAC's 13,799 pictograms. The other major openly licensed set is Mulberry, published under CC BY-SA — the same sharing terms without the non-commercial clause, which matters if you need symbols for something you intend to sell.