Finding a Voice: AAC Device Family Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe augmentative and alternative communication: speech-generating devices, eye-gaze systems, communication apps, core word boards, and the families who learned to use them. Writers describe the years before the words — the frustration, the behaviour that was actually communication, the professionals who advised waiting — and then assessment, funding and the long wait, with insurance and education authority battles described in detail. There is learning it together: the modelling that adults have to do for months before a child uses it, the vocabulary decisions, the training that schools did and did not provide. Writers describe first real sentences with extraordinary precision. Later chapters cover voice banking and adults who acquired a device after stroke, ALS or laryngectomy, professionals' perspectives, and the devices that went into a cupboard and stayed there.

Who it's for

For families beginning AAC, speech and language therapists and teachers, adults facing progressive speech loss, and anyone fighting for funding for a device.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 287 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.