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A 30-Year Journey From Skepticism to Acceptance: Reconsidering the Authenticity of Assisted Communication of Nonspeakers
My introduction to assisted communication (AC) for nonspeaking and minimally speaking individuals was in reference to facilitated communication (FC). During July of 1991 at the Autism Society of America's annual conference, I was asked to participate on a panel that was hastily organized to have an...
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Building Functional Communication: Empowering Families Through Evidence-Based Caregiver Intervention
Communication is a tool that takes many different forms. When most people hear this word, they think of verbal communication, as used in this article. However, even within verbal communication, there are many ways of expressing ideas, needs, and thoughts. Some of these methods of communication are...
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Studying Understanding Without Speech: Neuroimaging Minimally Speaking Autistic Individuals
Minimal speakers (MS) represent one-third of the autism spectrum, yet only 2% of autism research participants (Russell et al., 2019). Research conclusions based on people unlike minimal speakers in significant ways may be skewed, leading to profound misunderstanding. We aim to correct...
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We Shall Overcome: Why I Am Certain Nonspeakers Will Win Our Rights to Communicate
I was born perfectly healthy and passed all my developmental milestones, including saying words like "ball" and "dog." Then suddenly, at 15 months, I lost all my spoken words and started to bang my head on the floor. My parents brought me to Yale Medical School, and their only recommendation was to...
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My Journey to Independent Typing: One Autistic Nonspeaker’s Story
Each autistic nonspeaker I know is trying to become independent with their communication. Of course. Why wouldn't we? If you have something to say, you want to be able to do it without help. Typing seems to be the holy grail for most. Why? Because the sad but true fact is that the...
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Core Learning Characteristics of Autism and Their Implications in Typing to Communicate
This article bridges the gap between decades of research in the field of autism and the actual cognitive-motor mechanics that define an autistic learning profile. Our objective is to cleanly identify why traditional Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) models often fail: they...
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“The Best Medicine Is Respect!” Creating a Supportive Healthcare Environment for Nonspeakers
For around 30% of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), verbal speech is limited, unreliable, or unavailable (Jaswal et al., 2026). Autistic people who are nonspeaking use a variety of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to communicate; this includes picture-based systems,...
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Presuming Competence: What It Really Means and Why It Is Life Changing
Presuming competence is such a core foundational principle for people working with non-speakers to understand. It is the very first thing we talk about in our training programs and a topic we revisit in every coaching session. Parents, staff, therapists, teachers, and anyone else interacting with...
