Alyssa Hillary Zisk's articles

Some Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) users repeat the same motions, like pressing the same button over and over on their device. But what does that mean? In this blog, we will further explore stimming and its relationship with AAC.

There are many things we now know to be true about Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)—both from research and from AAC users’ lived experiences. However, even with the research showing us certain things to be true, certain myths persist in the AAC community.

There is a lot of space between being nonspeaking and being able to consistently meet all of our communication needs using socially expected amounts of speech. Many autistic people, including me, live in that space and use AAC to communicate at least some of the time.

At the heart of every adaptation at AssistiveWare is a singular goal: enhancing the experience of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) users and communication partners. Leveraging Apple's latest innovations, we're excited to integrate transformative features into our suite of AAC apps.

Words can shape perceptions. So, we asked what words people like, use, dislike, or don’t understand related to AAC. Here we share the survey results and our recommendations on what words to use and what words to avoid.

Words are the building blocks of language, and language is how we tell stories. It’s how we tell each other who we are. Words can shape perceptions—calling AAC a “clinical practice” paints a very different picture from saying AAC is “all the ways we communicate.”

Autism Acceptance Month challenges us to examine how we teach autonomy and privacy to people learning to use AAC. Alyssa Hillary is an Autistic graduate student in neuroscience, where they do AAC-related research. Their perspective on privacy and autonomy was so powerful that it needed its own blog, which they tell about in their own words here.