Basically, I'm Mel, I'm a long-time aug comm user who knows a huge number of people who either do use aug comm or wish they had the resources to use aug comm. And yet only some of us are able to use it at all, and very few of us are able to use it to its full potential. Mostly because the people who make, distribute, and train in aug comm, only take into account a narrow range of experiences of aug comm users. And even within that narrow range, they get a lot wrong, because most aug comm is made for the benefit of speech pathologists and parents far more than it's made for the benefit of aug comm users. A lot of is aimed at children or people who are presumed to be "like children". Very little of it is aimed at adults, very little of it takes the complexity of our needs into mind, and very little of it deals with high-level communication problems of various sorts. Hell, I was just reminded of all this by a professional in the field just before creating this blog. But most professionals won't even admit a fraction of it. There's also a lot of myths and taboos in the aug comm world, things users are not supposed to bring up at all, things nobody is supposed to bring up, things we're supposed to pretend out of existence. So ideally this blog would be for discussing all that. Maybe at some point it'll be a group blog, I don't know, but for now I'm the only person on it. I will hopefully not just be representing my own perspective, but also the perspectives of other people I've run across over time. That said, I'm going to be biased, and that's not a bad thing, especially given the directions the biases in the field run at the moment. We need a lot more people with the biases of actual aug comm users speaking up. Anyway, this blog is for literally anything related to aug comm, from very personal stuff to very general stuff and eveyrthing in between -- keeping in mind that even things that sound very much like a single personal experience, never are. They're always in a general context. And if one person is experiencing something, so are... hundreds, thousands, millions? I'm not good with large numbers of people and statistics, but you get the idea. Nobody's unique experience is that unique even if everyone says it is. And we're often told we're unique as a way of making sure nobody has to tackle our experiences when planning for stuff. Plus people really have often never heard stuff before, so they can mistake things for unique that aren't at all. Anyway, there may be tons of posts on this blog, or there may be none, and that's the way my blogs go. I have pretty bad inertia so I don't have a lot of conscious control over my post output. I can't even give you a lot of information in this post about what aug comm I use and/or need, and why I use and/or need it, let alone more in-depth information. So you'll have to do with this post. I can say that my main AAC is Proloquo2Go at the moment, I use both the typing and the grids. That I've had plenty of other kinds of aug comm devices in the past, some purchased on my own and others through insurance, some high tech and some low tech. I also use home sign (a term originated in the Deaf community for the signs that children invent at home outside of recognized sign languages, but also used by other people with speech difficulties at this point) and assorted noises. I used to have speech but even at its most fluent-sounding, which was very, it was never 100% communicative or even approaching that, so my speech history is extremely complicated and could probably fill an entire book in itself. I have a complicated combination of cognitive and physical disabilities that render communication difficult in any form, some in ways that are more or less constant and others in ways that are more or less always shifting and changing. Also, my tendency to write things in a very long-winded fashion and have trouble summarizing them in short form is, itself, part of my communication problems and one that I work hard to overcome but that I can't always. So please don't blame me when I'm longwinded and can't provide summaries -- it's not a choice. One thing I really hope to document is the number of communication problems that nobody ever seems to want to talk about or even recognize exist at all. But that's one thing among many. I've just known so many people with such a wide array of problems that every single description of communication problems I've ever seen in aug comm literature seems grossly oversimplified at the very best. And generally they're only taking a fraction of that stuff into account even so. I also want to get into common myths about AAC both among the general public and among actual AAC professionals and users alike. And controversies, sometimes. And other things. Anything related to AAC is fair game pretty much for material for this blog. All from my particular biased perspective and sometimes the particular biased perspectives of other people I know whether they resemble mine or not. But mostly mine and those similar because that's what I know best and I know most people aren't hearing these things so our voices need to be counted in. (Strange how AAC is supposed to be all about our voices but our voices are rearely heard in AAC contexts except when they are in service to what everyone already believes anyway.)
