Literacy and AAC

Also called AAC literacy, Reading and writing for AAC users, Literacy for non-speaking learners

Why reading and spelling are the road to saying anything at all, and why non-speaking children are so often not taught them.

What it is

Literacy and AAC is the argument, and the practice, that non-speaking people should be taught to read and spell like everyone else, because for them it's not only literacy: it's the only route to saying a word nobody put on the board. A symbol set has a few hundred words. A keyboard has all of them. The person who can spell is the person who can say "I don't want Mark to do my personal care" without waiting for someone to add the symbols.

It's a well-evidenced position and a badly implemented one. Many non-speaking children leave school unable to read, not because they couldn't learn but because nobody assumed they could, and the phonics lesson was replaced by a symbol-matching task.

Who it can help

Every non-speaking or minimally speaking child, whatever their diagnosis, and adults who were never taught. The usual objection is that a child "isn't ready" or "can't do phonics because they can't say the sounds". Neither holds. Phonics is about hearing and recognising sounds, not producing them; a child who can select the sound they hear can do phonics. And readiness is created by teaching, not waited for.

It's not a reason to withhold symbols until literacy arrives. Symbols and spelling run side by side, and the Talk board has both on one screen for that reason.

How it works

The same phonics as everyone else, adapted in access rather than content. The child learns phonemes and graphemes, blends to read and segments to spell; the difference is that the responses happen by pointing, eye gaze, switch or keyboard rather than by mouth. A phonics keyboard that says each sound when selected, and says the blended word, gives the feedback a speaking child gets from their own voice.

Alongside phonics, shared reading with real books, every day, for meaning and for pleasure (reading with non-speaking children), and writing from the start: choosing letters to make a word, even if the word is "no", even if the spelling is rough. Emergent writing, with a full alphabet available, is where speaking children begin, and it's where non-speaking children should begin too.

Access is the practical barrier. A keyboard needs a way to press it: touch, a big-key keyboard, switch scanning, eye gaze or partner-assisted scanning through the alphabet. Whichever it is, it needs setting up before the lesson, not instead of it.

Getting started

Put an alphabet in front of the person, today, and use it yourself. Point to letters as you spell their name. Spell a word on the keyboard while you say it. Nobody has to prove anything before the alphabet appears.

Ask the school what phonics programme the class is on, and how the child is included in it. "They do a different activity" is the answer to push back on. Ask for the same lesson with an adapted response: pointing to the grapheme, choosing between two, pressing it on a keyboard.

Give a way to write every day. The Talk board's phonics keyboard uses the full UK grapheme set and speaks each sound and each built word; the letter keyboard has big keys and works with a switch. Five minutes of typing something true, however rough, is literacy.

Where to get help

Communication Matters is the UK AAC charity and campaigns on literacy for AAC users. ACE Centre publishes practical literacy resources and trains schools. CALL Scotland does the same in Scotland. For the phonics side, the British Dyslexia Association. If the school won't include the child in phonics, that's a communication provision in an EHCP question.