For thirty years Steve Rose has been learning to read the bodies of children who can neither see nor hear. This is his framework, made to survive a Tuesday.
Observation, profiles, goals and reports in one place. No paper. No real names, ever.
Steve is one of my closest friends. He lives in Australia now. He spent his career learning the communication of children the world had mostly given up on, and he is a better person than me, trying to do better things than I do.
When I started building software he asked me to make two things for him. This is one of them. I am not a clinician. I am the friend who can build, so I am carrying his life’s work across an ocean for him.
His framework already worked. It always worked. What it never had was a way to stay alive between a session on Monday and a report due in three months. That is the only thing this tool is for.
Paper forms get lost.Observation notes drift from the framework’s language. Goals get set without connecting to the evidence underneath them. And the distance between a session and the report it should feed is measured in months.
tactile fw closes that distance. Every observation is structured by domain. Every skill links to Steve’s own guidance. Every goal traces back to the thing you actually saw.
Before shared communication can begin, the practitioner learns to read the learner's body. To attend, to anticipate a routine, to notice the bodily trace an emotion leaves behind.
The first deliberate signals. The learner begins to act on the partner, not just react to the world.
Shared meaning starts to hold across moments. Signs begin to repeat and to be understood by both partners.
Early conventional language, anchored in the body and the shared history of the pair.
Language that travels beyond the pair and the present moment.
10 domains. 107 skills. Each one carries Steve’s full observation guidance, inside the tool, where you need it.
Explore the skills
Pre-intentional. The practitioner learns to read the learner's body before shared communication can begin.
Attend to object or person
Anticipate routines
Experience bodily emotional traces
Evidence for EHCP reviews that traces from observation to skill to goal, in the framework's language.
Daily classroom moments become framework-referenced evidence. The whole team speaks one language.
Record what you notice in the moment. The guidance is inside the form, not back in the document.
One consistent, framework-faithful tool across a service, with privacy built for clinical data.
Share a caseload securely with colleagues. SLT services, sensory teams, and NDIS allied health providers.
Every observation, every rating, every goal you recorded becomes structured evidence. Press build, and the right framing assembles for the right system, with a live preview before anything downloads. Nothing leaves your device.
Try it in the demo without signing up
Six sample learners are already populated with observations, skills and goals. Open one and build a report end-to-end, complete with PDF download.
The same respect the framework asks you to show the child is built into the architecture. Identifiable details about a deafblind learner are excluded from the system from the outset. This is not a setting you remember to switch on. It is the only way the tool can be used.
Learners are references you assign. Case 01, LB-2026, whatever your service uses. No real names in the system.
Partner and location are dropdowns, never free text that could name a person or a relationship.
The notes field watches for words that look like names and warns you before you save.
The app never asks for the camera or the microphone. No photos, no audio, no video of any learner.