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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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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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You Are the Expert on Your Preferred and Effective Communication – “Le Pape v. Lower Merion School District,” a Landmark Civil Rights Case
Alex Le Pape was in high school when he told Lower Merion School District that a letter board was his preferred and effective means of communication and asked to use it throughout the school day. At an age when most students are simply trying to navigate adolescence, with that request, Alex began...
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The Quietest People in the Room Often Have the Most to Say
Note: Names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. The phone rang on a weekend. On the other end was a young woman from one of our community-based programs. Just hours earlier, she had experienced every child's nightmare. She had witnessed her mother suffer a fatal...
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The Visual Aspect of Increasing Communication Across Disciplines
Speech pathologists and behavior analysts each bring distinct expertise, yet their greatest impact is realized through integrated service delivery. Separately, these two provider groups apply principles unique to their respective science and discipline, but it is together, with support from...
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More Than Spoken Words: How DSPs Help People Find Their Voice
Everyone has a voice, even if they don't communicate through speech. Expression can take many different forms — from gestures and facial expressions to communication devices, pictures, and written words. When people with developmental disabilities are given the tools, support, and opportunities...
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Re-Envisioning Our Unnecessarily Disabled Futures
Most disabled adults are forced to live segregated, impoverished lives absent of the security, life expectancy, community, and agency that all human beings deserve. For those of us from historically marginalized communities, including non-speakers, the isolation can be even more profound. The life...
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A Stronger, Unified Voice for Autism Professionals
I went to my first ABA conference recently as a newcomer twice over: as a psychologist who had spent a career adjacent to the field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) without ever truly stepping inside it, and as the parent of an autistic son. As a psychologist, I built a multi-disciplinary...
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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...
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Communication, Regulation, and Trust: Supporting Non-speaking Autistic Individuals in Everyday Life
A Few Truths The world is often set up in ways that are highly unreliable and unpredictable for autistic people. This sets the stage for frequent dysregulation, disengagement, and disability, all of which can be even more extreme for non-speaking autistic individuals. The frequent bias towards...
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Rethinking Evidence-Based Practice for Supporting Nonspeaking Individuals
In considering the issue of evidence-based practice (EBP), we take on a deceptively simple question—what counts as "evidence" of effectiveness of approaches in supporting the communication of nonspeaking autistic individuals? Beneath that question lies a deeper and more contentious issue—how...
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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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Advancing the Rights-Based Inclusion of People Who Need and Use AAC: A Guide to Allyship
People often ask CommunicationFIRST for our recommendations for interacting with people who need and use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools and supports,1 including nonspeaking autistic people, autistic people who are sometimes able to speak, and people with other...
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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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Mental Health Care for People Who Use AAC: Rationale and Practice
Introduction: A Speller's POV Therapists are my heroes — they transform problems into paths toward the future you want to build. I was scared to start. My psychiatrist told me that meds alone would not solve my anxiety, and she encouraged me to give therapy a try. Dreams make work, and...
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Training Communication Partners for Nonspeaking Spellers: A Replicable, Evidence-Informed Framework
I have watched my adult nonspeaking, autistic son be offered a letterboard by someone untrained in his primary form of communication: spelling. His thoughts were clear, but the board wasn't properly placed, no relationship had been established, no motor coaching was provided — and nothing came...
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The Work Before the Work: Lessons From Co-Designing Assistive Technology With Nonspeaking Autistic People
"I still struggle to put into words what it felt like to finally communicate in a personal, voluntary, and unscripted way. I've described it before as a prison door opening, but it was even more profound than that – more freeing, more life-changing." – Lisa, nonspeaking co-author For...
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The Miracle Project’s Express Yourself Program Gives Nonspeaking/Multi-Modal Artists the Stage
The Miracle Project (TMP), founded in 2004, is internationally recognized as the first systematic, evidence-based program to use expressive and performing arts to improve quality of life and relationships for autistic individuals while challenging negative societal stereotypes through authentic...
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Giving Voice to Non-Speakers: Language, Respect and the Power of Naming
For the longest time, I used the term non-speaking synonymously with non-verbal, having been taught ‘non-verbal’ in graduate school. Since that time, new terms and definitions have emerged with the advent of a variety of disability rights movements. Person-First Language Person-first...
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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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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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The Right to Learn: One Nonspeaking Autistic Student’s Case for Educational Access and Dignity
Beginning as a small child, school is where you make friends and learn to process the world around you. Most of modern society is formed on the basis that people have received a formal education. Whether that education be from primary to high school, or onward to a college education, it is presumed...
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Connecting With Nonspeakers: A Practical Guide
April traditionally brings showers, but in my world, it brings Autism Awareness Month – or is it Autism Acceptance Month, or is it Autism Action Month? It seems the verbiage changes from year to year. Awareness is good, acceptance is great, but action is the key to inclusion. For me, April means...
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Very Great Sound: The Case for Teaching Poetry to Nonspeaking Autistic Students
Last April, I found myself in a Stockholm studio, sitting next to my college buddy Spencer Reece, with whom I'd taken my first creative writing course forty-three years ago—our teacher was the Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard. We had traveled to Sweden to teach our own creative writing...
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The Power of Presuming Competence: A Nonspeaker’s Call to Action
I stop and think about what I went through as a young child all the time. On a scale of 0 to 10, so many of the therapies that overtook my life would get a negative number! It wasn't that the therapists were bad people; it was because the initial premise of the treatments was fatally flawed. How? I...
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Lessons From Listening to a Typer: Stony Brook Medicine School of Social Welfare Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Other Related Disabilities (LEND) Fellowship Program
Director's Perspective It was July 2022, and I had just finished my first year as the Director of the Stony Brook University Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Other Related Disabilities (SBU LEND) Program. Invited to present on the Research Panel for the I-ASC Motormorphosis...
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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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What Parents Should Know About ASHA’s Position Statement on Spelling Methodologies
Ninth grade was a turning point for my nonverbal daughter with autism. After years in a life skills classroom, she moved into an academic setting. For the first time, she was studying algebra instead of counting money and writing paragraphs instead of discussing the weather each morning. This...
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Opening the Door: Psychotherapy With Nonspeaking or Unreliably Speaking Autistic Young Adults
This article is about providing psychotherapy services to nonspeaking or unreliably speaking autistic young adults. Going forward the terms "communicators," "typers," or "spellers" are used interchangeably to describe this group. My hope is to encourage parents, professionals, and the wider...
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Autistic Lived Experience: Re-Thinking the Reasons for Past Behaviors
A late autism identification has a tendency to change one's perspective on things. My own identification at age 40 is certainly a case in point. Many questions for which there were never satisfactory explanations, answered. A half-baked self-identity made whole. In essence, a newly discovered lens...
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Why Message-Passing Tests Are Unethical
Spelling as a method of communication access for non-speakers is rapidly expanding within the Profound Autism community. Thousands of Spellers have gained communication through Spelling to Communicate (S2C), Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), Spellers Method, and other assistive communication methods....
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Building Community and Advocacy: From Voiceless to SEEN and Heard
I got used to being silent. It was the loneliness and being invisible that was soul crushing. Being able to finally say anything I wanted as a nonspeaking autistic with apraxia was liberating. I have never been able to communicate by using my mouth. When I was a child, I did speak a few...
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The Evolution of Training for Facilitated Communication
I first learned about facilitated communication (FC) in 1991 when a colleague shared with me Professor Douglas Biklen's 1990 article in the Harvard Educational Review, “Communication Unbound: Autism and Praxis.” This article was a qualitative research study on the method based on his...
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“All Done Talkin’ ‘Bout It:” One Mom’s Journey to Communicating With Her Autistic Daughter
I vividly remember when Annie was diagnosed with autism on Jan. 8, 2004, the day before her second birthday. I had no idea what autism was, other than how it was depicted in the movie “Rain Man,” starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. I felt shocked, worried and alone. I didn't know any other...
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Beyond the Device: Teaching Meaningful, Spontaneous Communication with Speech-Generating Devices
A key component of a high quality of life is the ability to clearly communicate one's needs and desires with others. Effective communication allows individuals to advocate for themselves, make choices within their environment, and express their thoughts and feelings. For autistic individuals,...
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Key Advances in Autism Research
Over the past decade, there has been a great deal of research dedicated to understanding the underlying etiology of Autism. There have been tremendous strides in the knowledge of the genetics, neuroanatomy, neurobiology and ultimately biochemical aberrations of this disorder. Additional research in...
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Supporting Social Communication in Autism: A Review of Evidence-Based Speech Therapy Approaches
When people think about autism and communication challenges, they often focus on speech itself. However, many autistic children develop age-appropriate vocabulary and grammar while continuing to experience significant difficulties with social communication. These challenges may include...
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Freeing the Mind: A Nonspeaking Autistic’s Case for Presuming Competence
Many nonspeakers are still locked in the prison of their own mind. Nonspeakers are underestimated because our bodies and brains are disconnected. Our minds work, but not with our body, so people conclude we are unintelligent. Apraxia is not well understood by parents, teachers, therapists, and the...
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Supporting Emotional Regulation in Non-Speaking Children
Every parent of a non-speaking child knows the moment. The grocery store gets too loud, a routine shifts without warning, a sibling grabs the wrong toy, and a child who seemed fine a minute ago is on the floor, or running, or frozen. Adults nearby may see "bad behavior." What is actually happening...
