Lily Pads

Okay, so let ’s get this out of the way first. I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.A few years ago, I wrote a blog piece about something I saw online, a photo of a group of speech language professionals seated around a table, communicating with each other using AAC devices. To my reactionary eye, the photo was troubling. It felt like just one more exercise for able-bodied people to “get” what it must be like to have a speech disorder like Schuyler’s. It looked bad to me in part because I was seeing it linked on the Facebook page of an AAC company, which felt unseemly to me. Worse to my eyes was the fact that they seemed to be having a lot of fun. My indignation raced out ahead of my brain.I posted a blog entry with my observations about what I perceived to be an ill-conceived stunt, and it lasted maybe half an hour online before my editor contacted me. She was getting pushback from the therapists in the photo, she said, and while she was willing to leave the post up, she wanted to give me the opportunity to choose its ultimate fate. I did what I should have done before tapping out a single word; I reconsidered my snotty position. And then I removed the post.Last week, Schuyler and I joined those same speech professionals, including Lindsey Paden, my best friend and original developer of what came to be known as the Chatterbox Challenge, and we participated in an identical session.And it was fantastic.Turns out the Chatterbox Challenge, which you canread more about her...
Source: Schuyler's Monster: The Blog - Category: Disability Authors: Source Type: blogs