Blogging against disabilism

Today is blogging against disabilism. I found by checking Dream Mom and the family voyage blogs. The family voyage linked to Diary of a Goldfish who started the day with another blogger last year.

So, in honor of the day, I will write today what I was planning on writing another day. I had a professional development day. It is actually the second recently which is quite nice. Anyway, today was a road show sponsored by Communication Matters which is the UK chapter of the International Society for Alternative Augmentative Communication (ISAAC). It is always nice to go to these presentations because you can hear from the vendors, play with devices and get ideas for therapy. Today, the vendors each did 20 minute presentations and you could pick which one you wanted to go to. It was interesting to hear about a couple devices that I had not heard of before and learned some stuff about some new features on devices/software I already know well. And I was able to hear the questions other people asked.

I also quite like these days because I really enjoy talking to vendors. It is interesting to me to see which ones "get it" and which ones don't. Many of the vendors are not speech therapists. A couple are and a couple used to be teachers but you can tell which ones have a language background and which ones don't. I think this may actually be part of the difficulty with AAC.

I have been working as a "speechie" for 8 years now and I feel like I am finally "getting" AAC. I have had many failures where the clients abandoned the system. It is frustrating because it is usually the communication partners and the vocabulary programmed that makes it fail. It is not the people using the devices. AAC takes a lot of time and effort on the part of the communication partners and you need people (or at least one person) who has an idea as to how to set up devices. When I took my AAC class in graduate school, I learned some theories but I didn't learn the practical stuff. I didn't really think about what language we speaking people use. I now think about that. I listen to the peers in the classroom. I listen to the teacher and that vocabulary. I have also done A LOT of continuing education in the area since it is a fast-changing area in the field.

Today at the road show, every single vendor demonstrated ultra polite speech such as "I would like ice cream." Who talks like that? Certainly not me. I say, "I want ice cream" or "I fancy an ice cream" or "hey, let's eat some ice cream" or some other way. I never use the ultra polite grammar. And yet, that is what people typically put on their clients/students AAC devices. Why should they be more polite than the rest of us?

When at a conference, I went to a discussion group on swearing led by a person who uses AAC. She was advocating for her right to have foul language put onto her device. Many people in the room were against having actual swearing on devices. We also discussed the need to put milder "bad" language on younger children's devices. Kids call each other "potty face" or things like it. Why shouldn't an AAC user?

The answer is usually that the communication partners aren't comfortable with that idea. People see someone who can't talk differently. They aren't exposed to the same social situations so they don't learn the social skills such as who you can call a "potty face" and who you can't. Also, people aren't comfortable reprimanding an AAC user the same way as a speaking child. They take the device away instead. I have had teachers erase the "I'm bored" button on their students devices. And yet, it is exactly this type of vocabulary that the children need. They need to be able to explore language and learn the social rules of conversation and interaction. Keeping them ultra-polite does not prepare them for the insensitive speakers they are going to encounter. It doesn't prepare them to interact with people who have no idea how to interact with an AAC user. It just keeps them socially inexperienced.