This year, the theme of AAC Awareness Month is “Innovation, Inclusion, and Advocacy.” By keeping up on the latest innovations in AAC and including people who use AAC and their families in your treatment plans, you can be a better advocate for people who use AAC.
This week, we’re providing even more resources that you can use when working with people who use AAC. Learn how you can address barriers, collaborate, and provide accommodations to help people who use AAC communicate.
Telepractice, Visual Impairments, and More
Bridging the Gap: Insights From Telepractice Augmentative and Alternative Communication Services in the Digital Age: Telepractice boosts AAC access, overcomes barriers, connects people with trained clinicians, and improves outcomes. Speech-language pathologists, people who use AAC, and their families discuss its potential of telepractice to expand services.
Children With Cortical/Cerebral Visual Impairment and Speech and Motor Impairments Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication: A Retrospective, Longitudinal Examination of School Records: Using AAC can be more difficult for children with visual problems and motor speech impairments. These authors discuss visual accommodations that can help children with cortical/cerebral vision impairment communicate.
“It’s a Lot of Collaboration”: Related Service Providers Supporting Literacy Instruction for Learners Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication: Interprofessional collaboration and goal planning can help maximize literacy instruction for learners who use AAC. Get more information about how to better collaborate in a school that helps children who use AAC learn to express themselves through reading and writing.
Multilingual Augmentative and Alternative Communication for the Monolingual Therapist: As an ASHA speech-language pathologist, you’re obligated to develop AAC solutions that meet the needs of children and their families—this includes developing bilingual AAC systems. This article can help you provide AAC assessment and intervention in a culturally responsive way.
Our Continued Commitment to AAC
After two posts full of AAC resources, we still have more to come! Stay tuned for a forum from the National Joint Committee for the Communication Needs of Persons With Severe Disabilities. If you can’t wait until 2026, you can read a number of the articles in the Newly Published section of the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (AJSLP).
We’ve published dozens of articles on AAC this year, and you can see them all in our AAC Topic Collection. Whether you work with clients who use high-tech speech-generating devices or low-tech picture boards, ASHA Journals has something for you this month and beyond!
