Meg's Response to the Proposed ASHA Position Statement

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) position statements recommended against the further use of methodologies known as Facilitated Communication (FC) and Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) in helping people with disabilities communicate.

I am a person with autism who learned to type with fc and I type independently now. I think you need to take into consideration all aspects of the situation. Really easy to underestimate good typists. They appear under pressure not to know where the letters are but they just can't control their bodies. Teaching people with autism to communicate is much more complicated than you think. We operate on a different wavelength. You cant use normal teaching strategies for abnormal disorders. Autism easily resembles mental retardation if misunderstood. Really everything boils down to understanding. Any thing that helps a person to share their thoughts with others should be allowed.

In a letter to the ASHA Board of Directors, a coalition of 23 civil and disability rights organizations argued, "If ASHA decides to finalize and place its imprimatur on the position statements, the consequences will almost certainly lead to civil rights violations. ASHA's reputation as a credible and mainstream credentialing organization that supports the rights of individuals with disabilities would be threatened."