Autism Acceptance Month: A love of technology can aid communication

Before Kris had an AAC device, he struggled to communicate his feelings. Not being able to make himself understood was incredibly frustrating for him and often ended in tears. 

After his mum got his diagnoses (autism and Williams Syndrome), she brought Kris to a speech therapist with a passion for AAC, who introduced Kris to a high-tech device. 

The first button he touched repeatedly? “I love this.”

For Autism Acceptance Month, we turned to Pediatric Solutions Consultant Erin Becerra for some insights into how our technology supports autistic kids. Erin helps speech therapists gain confidence using high-tech AAC, like the TD Navio speech-generating device and TD Snap communication software.

Let's say I’m a speech therapist who’s never tried high-tech AAC with my autistic clients. Where do I start?

I get a lot of calls from speech therapists who are new and curious about AAC. The first thing I like to remind them about is that high-tech solutions are under our scope of practice.

Just like anything else in the speech therapy field, we can learn more. We have the Learning Hub, we can meet over Zoom and do a little bit of training and in-service, or sometimes an in-person in service. 

I just want speech therapists to feel empowered that they can dive in and use AAC with their clients in the right away.

How is TD Navio designed for autistic kids?

Kids can run around with this device. It has a carrying strap and it’s durable. Kids can choose their color and their voice. 

I love that the back was left open. Maybe you can add stickers and customize it to your own interests. That's actually feedback I've gotten a lot as a pediatric consultant: “I wish we could customize this and make it really interesting for my child.” So I love that we listened to that feedback and made those changes.

What about TD Snap?

 I love the ability to customise based on their interests. When I'm in a consultation, I'll ask a parent: “Tell me what they're passionate about.” That's when we're going to create some buttons on the fly. I can let them take a look and pick the picture that they love, and I can bet that they're going to want to press that button.

In TD Snap you can also make YouTube buttons. Kids love to be able to watch favourite videos, rewind and replay, or even have the video set to play at a precise preferred moment. 

Any cool TD Snap tricks you want to share?

 One of the really neat features of our TD Snap software is that each page can be printed. If you've put in a lot of work as a speech therapist or a family customising your child's page set, you can actually print the exact version of all those pages as a lite-tech backup.

Find a Solutions Consultant near you to learn more about high-tech solutions.