Free Printable Communication Cards for Autism

Picture communication cards are small cards showing a word or idea in symbol form, which a child hands over, points to or touches to say something. They are the cheapest way in the world to give a child who does not speak — or who does not speak reliably when stressed — a way to be understood.

This page gives you a starter set of cards written out in full, so you can make them today with a marker and index cards, plus the free, openly licensed sources where you can download properly drawn symbols and ready-made communication boards without paying anything.

One thing to clear up first, because it causes real confusion: free picture cards are not PECS. PECS is a specific trademarked protocol with paid training and purchased materials. What is on this page is picture communication, which is the broader thing PECS is one version of. More on that below.

Everything here was checked on its own site on 2026-08-18.

Start with the words that do the most work

The instinct is to make cards for nouns — juice, biscuit, iPad, dog. Nouns are easy to draw and easy to teach, and they are also the words that run out fastest. A child with forty noun cards can name forty things and still cannot say "stop," "again," or "not that one."

The research-backed alternative is core vocabulary: the small set of high-frequency words that make up most of what anyone says, in any situation. Project Core, from the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, publishes a Universal Core vocabulary of 36 words designed exactly for this, and states that the boards are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence — genuinely free, and free to adapt (project-core.com, verified 2026-08-18).

If you are making cards this afternoon, start with these.

The first eight

Card	What it lets your child do
more	Ask for continuation of anything
all done / finished	End something without escalating
stop	Object without a meltdown
help	Recruit you before frustration peaks
want	Combine with anything else
not / no	Refuse — the most important word on the board
go	Start, leave, move on
look	Direct your attention

The next sixteen

Category	Cards
People	I / me, you, mum, dad
Actions	eat, drink, play, open
Describing	big, little, different, again
Places and things	here, there, that, in

Feelings and body

Card	Note
happy
sad
angry / mad
scared
tired
hurt	Pair with a simple body outline card so a child can point to where
loud / too loud	Often the single most useful card in the set
bright / too bright

Everyday routines

Category	Cards
Food	eat, drink, water, snack, hungry, thirsty
Bathroom	toilet, wash hands
Home	bed, bath, shoes, coat, outside
Preferred activities	Add four to six of your child's actual favourites, using photographs

Note the "no" card sitting on the first list. It is the one most parents leave off and the one that changes the most. A child who can refuse using a card has much less reason to refuse using their body.

Making them

Nothing here needs a printer, though a printer helps.

1. Cut index cards to about two inches square. Big enough to grab, small enough that twenty fit in a hand.
2. One idea per card, with the word written on it. Always write the word, even for a child who does not read. The word is for every adult who will ever pick up that card — teachers, grandparents, a paediatrician.
3. Use photographs for anything personal. Your bathroom, your car, your child's actual cup. Use drawn symbols for concepts like "more," "help" and "different" that cannot be photographed.
4. Laminate, or use packing tape. These get chewed, dropped in baths and posted through radiator grilles.
5. Velcro them to a ring, a strip of card, or a folder — soft-side Velcro on the cards, hard-side on the backing.
6. Make duplicates. One set at home, one in the bag, one at school. A communication system that lives in one room communicates in one room.

Teaching them

The most common mistake is turning the cards into a quiz. "What's this one? Show me 'more.' Where's 'help'?" That teaches a child that cards are a test they can fail.

What works better is modelling — using the cards yourself, in ordinary conversation, without requiring any response. Touch "more" as you pour more juice. Touch "all done" as you clear the plate. Touch "stop" when you stop the tickling. You are showing what the cards are for, the same way you showed what words were for years before they said one.

Then set up moments where the card is genuinely the easiest route: a favourite thing in sight but out of reach, a snack given in small portions so "more" is worth saying, a game that stops until something happens. Honour every single use immediately, including the ones you would rather not — especially "no" and "stop." A card that is sometimes ignored is a card that stops being used.

If your child is nonspeaking or minimally speaking, supporting non-speaking autistic children covers the broader picture, and AAC devices for autism covers where cards fit alongside apps and dedicated devices. Cards and a device are not competitors — most families end up with both, because paper never runs out of battery.

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Where to download free cards and boards

All verified free on 2026-08-18.

Project Core Universal Core boards

From the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Free downloads of 36-location communication boards, two-page versions, classroom posters, four-square books, partner-assisted and eye-gaze books, and 3D-printable files. Openly licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 as stated on project-core.com — among the most permissive licences of any source on this page. project-core.com/communication-systems · verified 2026-08-18

Do2Learn printable picture cards

A large free library of printable picture cards organised by category — self-help and toileting, dressing, personal care, health care, everyday activities, home, school, food, emotions, behaviour, safety and calendar. Each set prints as large images, two-inch cards and one-inch cards, with or without words. The site states its material was "[d]eveloped with NIH grants" and is offered free (do2learn.com). We downloaded without signing in. We could not find a licence statement for the cards, so print for your own use and link rather than republish. do2learn.com/picturecards/printcards · verified 2026-08-18

Open symbol libraries

If you want to build your own cards from properly drawn symbols:

• ARASAAC — around 13,000 pictograms (12,909 indexed by OpenSymbols) from the Government of Aragón, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA: attribution required, share-alike, commercial use excluded. Verified 2026-08-18.
• Mulberry Symbols — scalable SVGs under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, with the licence noting "you must not charge for the symbols themselves." Verified 2026-08-18.
• Sclera — high-contrast black-and-white pictograms, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial. Worth trying if colour symbols are visually busy for your child. Verified 2026-08-18.
• OpenSymbols — searches over 50,000 symbols across eleven libraries and displays the licence for each library. Start here if you are not sure which set you want. Verified 2026-08-18.
• Global Symbols — 40-plus symbol sets including multilingual and culturally adapted ones, plus a free board builder. Includes Tawasol, an Arabic-adapted set under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0, if English symbols do not fit your family. Verified 2026-08-18.

Indiana Resource Center for Autism

Printable visual supports from Indiana University covering health and personal care, school, home, emotions and behaviour — useful for the routine-specific cards a general symbol library will not have. iidc.indiana.edu — IRCA visual supports · verified 2026-08-18

Texas Education Agency toolkit

Free printable choice boards, break cards, help signals, behaviour cue cards and voice volume meters from the Texas state education agency. Open PDFs, no login. spedsupport.tea.texas.gov · verified 2026-08-18

About PECS

Because the phrase "free PECS cards" is everywhere, here is what PECS actually is, from its owner's own site.

The Picture Exchange Communication System was developed in 1985 by Andy Bondy, PhD and Lori Frost, MS, CCC-SLP. It is a six-phase teaching protocol, not a set of cards: Phase I, how to communicate by exchanging a single picture for a desired item; Phase II, distance and persistence; Phase III, picture discrimination from a communication book; Phase IV, sentence structure using a sentence strip; Phase V, responsive requesting — answering "What do you want?"; Phase VI, commenting. Pyramid Educational Consultants, which owns the system, states that "the most effective way to learn how to implement PECS is by attending PECS Training," and sells training, e-learning and a training manual. "Picture Exchange Communication System®, PECS®, and Pyramid Approach to Education®" are stated on the site as registered trademarks of Pyramid Educational Consultants, LLC (pecs.com, verified 2026-08-18).

So: the free cards on this page are picture communication cards. They are genuinely useful, they are free, and thousands of families use them well. They are not PECS; the PECS protocol, its training and its manual are sold by Pyramid Educational Consultants rather than given away, and any page offering "free PECS" is describing something else. If the formal protocol is what you want, ask your child's speech therapist — some are PECS-trained already, and if so it may be delivered within speech therapy you are already receiving. Worth asking your provider directly.

What we left off

• Boardmaker — commercial software, sold as a standard licence or a subscription, with a trial period; we found no free tier. The legitimate free route to those symbols for personal and educational use is the ConnectABILITY Visuals Engine, which states the Mayer-Johnson symbols it uses "can be used for non-commercial, personal and education purposes." Verified 2026-08-18.
• Twinkl — free downloads are gated behind a trial or membership, not permanently free.
• Teachers Pay Teachers free listings — free items still require a TPT account to download; we could not verify download without signing up.
• STAR Autism Support classroom tools — the page states you must log in to access the full list, and the main tools are sold.
• Autism Speaks visual supports tool kit — every attempt to load their pages on 2026-08-18 returned a security challenge, so we are not describing it.

When cards are not enough

Picture cards have a ceiling. They are excellent for requesting, refusing and naming, and they are limited for anything longer, anything abstract, and anything the child wants to say that you did not think to make a card for. If your child is using cards well and clearly wants to say more than the cards allow, that is a good problem, and the answer is usually a speech-language pathologist and a look at AAC options — many of which start free or can be borrowed through your state's assistive technology lending library, which we cover in free stuff for autistic kids.

One thing worth saying plainly, because parents are still told the opposite: there is no evidence that picture cards or a device stop a child from speaking. In the main research review of the question, none of the 27 cases showed a decrease in speech production after AAC intervention — 11% showed no change and 89% showed gains (Millar, Light and Schlosser, 2006, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research). If anyone tells you your child has to "earn" a communication system by trying harder to talk, get a second opinion.

All sources verified 2026-08-18. If a link has moved or a resource is no longer free, tell us.

Related guides

• Free Printable Visual Schedule for Autism — the schedules, first-then boards and routines to pair with these cards.
• Free Autism Printables — the full printables hub.
• AAC Devices for Autism — where cards fit alongside apps and devices.
• Supporting Non-Speaking Autistic Children — the bigger picture.
• Free Autism Resources for Parents — the full hub.

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Raising Brilliance is a resource for families raising autistic children — practical, calm, and respectful of autistic people. This page is general information, not medical advice.