chavisory:

Wow, okay.

I know that there are autistic people who cannot, presently, communicate in a way that we know how to understand well.

I have never and will never say that autism isn’t a disability or that no one can be profoundly disabled by autism.  Never.  I do not know who you think I am, but I am not one of those people.  A perusal of my blog on the topics of autism or disability would’ve told you that.  I consider myself disabled by autism, and most of the autistic people I know do.

I know that there are completely non-speaking people.  Many of them are able to use other methods of communication, like AAC devices, letter boards, ASL, or sounds and gestures.  Some are not.

I know that there are autistic people who we have not found an effective way to communicate with yet.

The key word there is “yet.”  When I say “we can do better for non-verbal autistic people,” what I mean is that I consider us generally–the advocacy world, the research world–to be morally bound to keep looking for communication methods that could help those people and keep trying to understand what their specific obstacles are and how to work with them.

“Some people just can’t communicate” doesn’t cut it.  We have not even come close to a situation in which all non-speaking people have access to AAC if they need it (about half of non-speaking adults do not), and in which most researchers and clinicians take seriously the capacity of many non-speaking/non-verbal people to think and communicate if their specific challenges and needs can be understood and met, or autistic-reported issues that may impact communication ability like movement disorders, exposure anxiety, and auditory processing disorder.  Though oral motor apraxia is one thing that is starting to be taken seriously as a common barrier to speech in autistic people.

It’s not that you personally just aren’t trying hard enough!  But when people close to a non-speaking person have already decided, or been told and believed, “this person does not communicate,” when this is a pervasive prejudice about non-speaking and non-verbal people, that puts you at risk of not seeing genuine attempts at communication as communication.

“Totally non-vocal” does not mean non-communicative.

I don’t know if you know, but every year for the past couple of years now, a tweet chat called #AutINSAR (#AutIMFAR in 2017) has been held during INSAR, which is the biggest annual conference on current autism research, to put autistic people directly in touch with researchers to talk about research priorities and goals.  And something that always tops the list of priorities that autistic people wish research would pursue is better and more available AAC, and how best to enable people with the most intense communication challenges.

Instead of continuing to throw millions and millions of dollars at trying to make mice autistic.

That is what I mean when I say “We can do better for non-verbal autistic people.”

Not that it is going to be easy or magical or somehow we will be able to turn every non-speaking person into someone who can communicate conventionally and articulately.

But we can do better than writing off non-verbal people as “just can’t communicate,” and we need to.