ATU776 – Crick Software with Neil Andrew

Hi, this is Neil Andrew and I am the Managing Director for US and International at Crick Software Inc. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 776 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on April 10th, 2026. On today’s show, we are excited to welcome Neil Andrew from Crick Software to talk about the accommodations that they have. Also, don’t forget listeners that coming up on April 22nd, 2026 will be Assistive Technology Awareness Day. We’ll be hosting an open house here at Easter Seals Crossroads from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM Eastern that day. But if you’re not able to join us in-person, you can join us remotely as we will be having a virtual open house at 10:00 AM Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 22nd.

I’ll put a link down in the show notes for more information so that hopefully you can join us, but for right now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Today, listeners, we welcome Neil Andrew to the show to tell us all about Crick Software, Inc, and the different solutions they have available to assist individuals with overcoming their writing barriers. Neil, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me, Josh. Great to be here.

Yeah, I am excited to get into talking about everything, but before we get into talking about Crick Software Inc and all the great tools available, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, thanks, Josh. So my name is Neil Andrew, as you’ve just mentioned, and as you can tell from my accent, I’m from across the pond, but I have actually had the pleasure of living in the US for six years, and I’ll get to that in a second. I started my career as an elementary school teacher way back when, in the mid-90s. I expanded my teaching experience out into Southeast Asia. I became Principal of an international school in Singapore. When I returned to the UK in the early 2000s, I became the first sales consultant for the embryonic Crick Software, which was very small and new at that time. And then I was instrumental in bringing the business across from the West Coast of the US where we had started in our infancy, across to the East Coast in 2008. And I had the pleasure of living here in Connecticut for six years while we got it up and running.

We’re now a blossoming business here in CT. And we are very proud that we have worked with school districts in almost every state of the US.

Nice. So a very normal story from across the pond, to Singapore, to Connecticut, the normal kind of trip everybody takes.

I know. Whenever I say it, I’m like, “Yeah, how did that happen?”

It’s amazing how we all get into these and everything. Well, I guess the reason we got you on here is to talk about Crick software. So I guess start us off by telling us about the company as a whole, when was it created, why, and those things.

Okay. Yes, of course. So the business name Crick comes from the last name of the founders or the founder, John Crick, founded Crick’s software along with his wife Anne Crick, way back in 1993. Both of them were teachers working in special ed. And John had the idea that something that was missing from the classroom was the ability to support children that he was working with, with access to whole words for literacy. So the process of writing was causing unnecessary struggles for students with certain barriers to learning, whether they be physical or cognitive. And so he always tells a great story about how he turned around to Anne one day and said, “Hey, Anne, how do you feel about me giving up my job? You go back to work full-time, and I invent a piece of software to solve this very clear issue.” Now, I’m not sure whether that was as simple as that, but basically Anne went out, became the main wage earner, and became lead teacher for literacy and English in a special needs school.

Meanwhile, over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, John Crick taught himself how to program a computer, and he wrote the very first version of Clicker, which is probably our best known product. And that very first version of Clicker became very popular in the UK very quickly, and within a couple of years had won some major national awards, and the second and third versions of Clicker followed very soon afterwards. In the very early 2000s, in fact, I think it might have been the late ’90s, John started to bring Clicker over to trade shows like ATIA and Closing the Gap that you’ll probably be familiar with in the US, and found unsurprisingly the very same challenges were facing teachers and students in the US. And so that’s why he brought Crick Software over across the pond in 2001, and we’ve had lots and lots of success ever since.

So we focus on literacy, and we focus on producing software tools that are designed to reach the broadest spectrum of students under the umbrella of something that I’m sure you’ve come across, Josh, called UDL, Universal Design for Learning. So the principle of that being if you design your product, whether it’s software, a building, a car, whatever it is, to enable and support the widest possible cross-section of the population, you actually end up with a better product. And we have stuck to that mantra and that philosophy all the way through. And I think that is testament to the driving force of John and Anne at the core of the business, but also all the brilliant people that we’ve taken on along the way, and the amazing impact that we see our products having on children every single day. People often say to me, “Hey, Neil, how come you’ve been with the business for 20 something years?” And I say, “Because when I wake up in the morning, I know that what I’m going to do today is going to make a difference to children in the classroom.” And that is a real privilege.

Awesome. Yeah, it really is. When you can find something that you not just enjoy, but you know really makes a difference for other folks. It makes getting up in the morning and showing up for work a whole heck of a lot easier, that’s for sure.

For sure. I feel very privileged. You make your own luck, Josh, but I feel extraordinarily privileged to be part of this journey, and part of this team and part of this vision.

That is awesome. And Neil, you led me right into the next question just by bringing it up, but tell us what is Clicker?

Excellent question. So the easiest way to describe Clicker to somebody who’s never seen it before is to think about a Word processor. Everybody’s familiar with a Word processor. Most people use something like Word. And what we’ve done over the years is take that concept of the end result being some writing on a page, and broken it right down into a whole range of customizable supports. So for some children, they will open Clicker, they will open a document, they will type right into it like a Word document, and they won’t use any of the supports at all, and that’s fine. And that’s what I’m talking about with regard to UDL. At the other end of the spectrum, we might be working with children who are a long way away from even basic literacy skills. And so for those children, we might start using Clicker with what we call whole word support.

So if you can imagine on your screen, on your Word processor, sitting at the bottom of the screen, and say the bottom third of the screen is a bank of words that when assembled correctly will create a sentence. Now, one of the key breakthrough features of Clicker that came out in almost the first version or the second version, was speech support. So basically, Josh, everything you see on screen, you can listen to. So if you can’t read a word in that bank of words at the bottom of the screen, you can simply right click on those words and they will read out loud to you. In addition, when you create your sentence, simply by clicking on the words to put them into the documents, that’s why it’s called Clicker. You click on a word, it goes into the document. When you punctuate your sentence with a question mark, an exclamation point or a period, that sentence will be read back to you.

Nice.

And that feature alone is useful to all students. Because any teacher will tell you, any adult, any person in the whole wide world will tell you that it’s really hard to edit your own work. It’s really hard to read back what you’ve written and proof it. If you listen back to what you’ve just created as a sentence, and there’s a spelling error, or there’s a word missing, you are much more likely to notice it. So the speech support serves a huge range of purposes. So that’s Clicker at its core. Behind the scenes, Clicker is registering and logging all of the supports that you are using as a student to create your finished piece of writing. And the reason for that is that teachers and facilitators can then go back and look at the structures and supports that a student has used to create their piece of writing, and decide which of those supports need to be amped up, and which of those supports maybe could be reduced and taken away.

Because ultimately, at the end of the day, each of these support features within Clicker is acting as a scaffold. So we use the term scaffolding for writing. And ultimately as a teacher, what you’re trying to do is understand when various scaffolds can be taken away, and empower that student to work without them. Some students will always need them, but the background analytical information that Clicker is able to provide is incredibly powerful. Additionally, to all of those basic things that I’ve just mentioned, we have a huge, a vast ready-made curriculum content component to Clicker. So effectively, when you first come to Clicker, you can go into a library of cross-curricular resources, all cataloged and easily searchable, and you can go right into language arts, or science, or math, or geography, or whatever it is, your social sciences, whatever it is that you’re looking for. And you can find ready-made Word banks, writing frames, mind maps, RSE support resources for any topic that you can think of.

And each of those resources, if you wish, as you get more familiar with Clicker, can be edited and adapted. So the possibilities really are infinite in the sense that you can create your own resources to support writing or support all aspects of literacy. You can utilize the free, downloadable resources from learning grids, or you can sit somewhere in the middle and you can take what’s available for free, and you can edit it for the needs of your students. And that has been at the core of our success.

Nice. And Neil, I really love how you bring up the scaffolding technique of just the student needs these supports, they’re using them, but maybe they’re not using them as much and we can pull those back. So I love that it’s empowering students to be able to learn, to be able to have the accommodations they might need, but then also for the students that improve on that, being able to still let them be successful, be able to remove those at the same time. That’s a great tool for the student and the teacher.

It’s critical. And it’s something that we’ve had at the core of what we do since the day we invented Clicker, or the day that John invented Clicker, and we’ve carried that all the way through. And over the years, various different teaching pedagogies have locked right into that. So one of the latest terms that certainly schools in the UK are using, is adaptive teaching, which is like differentiation, that is a term that’s been used for years. But adaptive teaching is more about making sure that the teaching is personalized for the student directly, so that they only have as much support as they need to produce that end goal. Yeah.

And Neil, I also found when looking at this, you also have DocsPlus. I guess what is that and how does this differ from Clicker?

Great segue, Josh. So DocsPlus, the easiest way of describing DocsPlus to people is, take the description of Clicker that I’ve just given you. Obviously, it’s easier when you go onto our website. You can obviously take a look and we’ll come to that at the end. Clicker is predominantly used in an elementary age range setting. DocsPlus is effectively the follow-on product from Clicker for middle and high school. So the key differences between Clicker and DocsPlus are that in Clicker, you have a fairly wide range of picture support options, including symbol support. So effectively, if you think about the word banks that I was describing, you can have pictures to go with words. I didn’t explain that in the first section because I was trying to give you a rapid overview.

In DocsPlus, we’ve got a more age-appropriate look and feel. So it’s less colorful, the interface I’m talking about. It looks more like a regular Word document, but you still critically have a range of customizable supports. The picture support is removed in DocsPlus because again, that’s considered maybe not to be so age appropriate for older students, or students working at a higher cognitive level, but you do still have speech support. So you can listen back to what you write, you can listen to whatever is made available to you in the word bars and mind maps that you are being provided with. And you also have access to a different set of cross-curricular, ready-made, downloadable resources through this resource called Learning Grids. And I should have said in the first section about Clicker that those resources for Learning Grids are created by a dedicated in house team of ex-teachers. Most of us are ex teachers, Josh, as you won’t be surprised to learn.

And so the easiest way to think about DocsPlus is it’s a follow-on from Clicker. One of the ways that DocsPlus is being used increasingly broadly or increasingly frequently with is in enabling access for tests and formal examination settings. So I’ll give you a UK example here. But in the UK, if you’re taking your end of high school examinations, if you have a particular learning challenge, you may have been assessed as somebody who’s allowed to have a scribe, or a reader, in an exam setting to support you. Well, DocsPlus can take the place of a human scribe or a human reader by something within it called exam mode.

So the exam facilitator can effectively set up a password protected interface, which gives or takes away the supports that that student is allowed in a formal examination setting. And it’s actually proven to be a huge problem solver for schools that are spending a fortune on human scribes and readers. And it’s also a nightmare to actually staff though, to find those people who are able to do it. So that’s been almost a side benefit of DocsPlus that we’ve built on in the last five or so years. So Clicker sits with typically the easiest way of explaining it, if you think about Clicker as being for your elementary age range, and then the transition moves to DocsPlus in middle and high school. Obviously there are settings where we’ve got students using Clicker in high school settings and vice versa, but broadly speaking, that’s the differentiator, I would say.

No, I think that’s great. And I love the way that you said there’s an exam mode. There’s always the place for scribes. There’s always a place for folks to read things. But at the same time, for individuals that can have those tools and use them independently, I always feel like it’s great to get used to doing things on your own, I guess, not have to have somebody there in the room. And like you said, I’ve known many folks that have had to reschedule exams over and over again because that person’s not available, because they can’t get the staff in there at the time.

That’s exactly right. And one of the things that we haven’t touched upon across both products, is that as part of the Universal Design for Learning umbrella that our products sit under, we’ve always been huge proponents of building accessibility into all of our products. So if I may just quickly touch upon a couple of the things there. So for students who have challenges with physical access to a device, so they may be using a wheelchair, or they may have fine motor control challenges, which mean that the use of a mouse or a keyboard is not practical. Both Clicker and DocsPlus, and all our products support what we call switch access, Josh. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. So being able to access the keyboard and all components of the product using either a single or two switch setup. In addition to that, our products also support iGaze, with which we’ve seen some phenomenal results.

So the ability to be able to use your eyes to control the mouse on the screen and all components of Clicker and DocsPlus, and a whole multitude of other nuanced accessibility features that have made our products so popular. And again, I go back to UDL. By doing that, by ensuring that the broadest section of the population has access to the product, you end up building better products.

Oh, definitely. And I love that those things are just built in. So however you need to access those tools, they’re available to you. Neil, I’m sure you have tons of these, but could you tell us a story of someone’s success using either Clicker or DocsPlus?

Yeah. So I’m going to give you an example of a fairly recent one. Sometimes these stories really hit your heart, and they really reinforce why you get up in the morning, why you do what you do. So we’ve been doing a lot of work with a school district in the south of England called Portsmouth. And within the city of Portsmouth, it has a very specific range of particular needs. It’s a highly deprived city. It has a very low literacy rate, it has a high poverty rate, and with that come a wide range of challenges within schools. We have been working with a range of schools within Portsmouth, and I had the pleasure of spending some time down there last year, and we went to visit a school that was supporting children with social and emotional behavior challenges, quite severe. An amazing school, amazing staff transforming young people’s lives, from settings where children were unable to adapt to a regular school environment.

And I was introduced to a young man who I think was about 14 years old. When he came to the school, he refused to put pen to paper. He was clearly an extremely articulate young man. He had a huge interest in sci-fi, and particularly things like the Marvel movies. When introduced to Clicker, and introduced to the fact that Clicker would read back to him as he wrote, and that he was able to access Word banks that his teacher would create for him to help him overcome his particular spelling challenges with the very complicated names of these sci-fi characters. Remember what I said, he produced nothing up until that time. I think he was like, I’m going to say he was a eighth or ninth grade US equivalent, and his teacher showed me a 10-page novella that he had written about all of his favorite sci-fi characters, just using the supports that were available in Clicker.

Clicker had effectively unlocked this amazing talent for writing, and yeah, it brought a tear to my eye, Josh.

Well, you’ve been at this for a while. How has Clicker and the other tools changed over time?

Oh, vastly. So one of the reasons why I believe we have continued to be successful is that as a software company, as an ed tech company, as a company supporting schools, you have to be evolving all the time. You have to be not just internally looking at all the ways in which you can enhance and improve your product, but you have to, and we’ve really, really embraced this over the years, you have to be listening to your customers. So not only do we listen to customers in an informal way right across the board, but we have got networks of quote unquote, power users, or close customers right across the world, in fact, not just the US, not just the UK, but internationally, with whom we perform very regular, almost like feedback sessions.

So we get them all together from different aspects of education right across the world. And what we’re trying to find out is, what’s working really well? What would you like to see? What’s the feedback from customers? Now, you can’t implement every single request that people have for products, but I would say to you, Josh, that the ideas for many, many of our product enhancements over the years have come originally from customers in real life settings, giving us those ideas. In terms of the products themselves and how they’ve evolved, I think one of the core things that you’re constantly battling when you’re developing software is feature creep. So theoretically, you can add any feature you want to a product, but at the heart of everything that we do, thinking back to that UDL, you’ve got to keep that user interface simple and intuitive enough for everybody to be able to use.

So we evolve our products, and we add functionality through very, very carefully monitored, measured, and managed channels. So nothing is done without very, very detailed analysis of what impact that new feature or that new function is going to have both positive and negative, before the development starts. And again, we’re very privileged to be completely in house. So everything we do from start to finish, from product concept to delivery of training and support, is done by our people within Crick Software. And so that’s another reason I think why we’ve become so successful is because we are an incredibly accessible company in terms of customers being able to get hold of us, in terms of the training and the quality of the training that we provide, and in terms of the support and ongoing customer service that we provide to everybody who buys into our product range.

Awesome. Neil, if our listeners want to find out more, what’s a good way for them to do that?

The best way to find out more, I would say, is to head over to our website. You can look up cricksoft.com. So that’s C-R-I-C-K-S-O-F-T.com. And then at the top of the page, there are multiple different ways of contacting us, so people can book in a product consultation, a discovery call. They can contact us about pricing. There are a variety of different ways to do it. Once you get onto one of the Contact Us pages, there’s guidance.

Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us all about CrickSoft, about Clicker, about DocsPlus, and really just talking about the universal design for learning and how these tools can help students of all abilities with really improving everything. And also the teachers that assist them too. I think sometimes that part gets overshadowed a little bit, but I think these are great tools to be able to help them as well. So thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about them.

Thank you, Josh. This has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, and I always love the opportunity to spread the word about Clicker and DocsPlus.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own, and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA project, Easter Seals Crossroads are supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.