Most of my help with AAC has come from the voluntary sector.
Spennymoor Toy Library put my family in touch with the Sequal Trust Charity, who bought me my first communication aid when I was 7.
Liberator, my communication aid supplier, put me in touch with 1 Voice when I was 10, and I started to meet the role models at 1 Voice weekends every December.
But not everyone gets the chance to meet a role model. They are not allowed to come to my school, which is really sad because there are many more students who cannot talk, and they don't have any AAC.
Does no-one know what can be done? Or do they doubt our ability to benefit from AAC?
How different our lives might have been if only the people around us had met a role model.
We could have been laughing and joking and learning AAC together all these years. Instead, 5 of use who can't talk in my class have sat down and shut up, with my un-used £5,000 machine on the table in front of us.
My family introduced my head teacher to the value of a role model visit by sharing with her two short talks by 1 Voice role models Nicola Bush and Amanda Creely and a video of a girl with Cerebral Palsy moving on from gazing at symbols on a sheet of Perspex to accessing a computer with a pillow-switch instead of a mouse.
Please read these excerpts from Nicola and Amanda's talks:
http://homepage.mac.com/terryjohnmick/jafw/html/aac_h/role_models.htm
A link on that page goes to short clips of 1 Voice under 13's showing how they access their aids with head and foot switches.
Dawn Seals offered to come and talk at my school in September 2002, and we asked every year when this might happen. She never did get a reply. Here's Dawn talking at 1 Voice Backpool 2004:
http://homepage.mac.com/terryjohnmick/jafw/html/fun/1v_04_norbrek.htm
Johanna and Mel, two role models I met at the ISAAC International Conference in Montreal last August, and who were meeting each other for the first time after working together online for years, describe the work they do in one of the videos with this story.
Meet some UK role models by watching 'Power of Communication' on Communication Matters website:
http://www.communicationmatters.org.uk/Publications/Videos/The_Power_of_Communication/the_power_of_communication.html
Meet the next generation of UK role models by watching the music track from 'Listen to Me', the DVD we made on the 1 Voice Teenage Project July 2007. Listen to Me won us a Diana Award:
http://www.1voice.info/films_music.html
Listen to Me: The Making Of, another chapter from our DVD is with this story.
I believe the quickest and best way to learn what can be done for and by everyone with communication disabilites, is to meet a fluent AAC communicator, someone who has overcome the very difficulties that some people seem to believe are a marker of no hope.
Meeting a role model might be the only way to change the minds of those in doubt, because if they do not believe there could be a solution then they are not likely to pop down the local library and look up AAC and Literacy.
They need to see it in action.
I believe everyone who has a communication disability, their families and friends, and the professionals who work with them, should have the right to meet an AAC role Model.
Michael Reed