The blogs on stroke and brain injury found on VoiceforLiving.com have highlighted the benefit of multi-modal communication, the role of the communication partner and the importance of honoring the personality and interests of the individual. Today, I want to tell you a story that shows the result of all of these important topics.
Kristy was a [...]
My friend has a 2-year-old son who, needless to say, is very active. When she is busy with cooking dinner or other such things, he is even busier…taking the opportunity to pull things out of drawers, playing with the telephone, grabbing objects of interest from the countertops. She needs to stay a step ahead of [...]
“My arms weren’t long enough anymore,” my friend said as she pulled reading glasses out of her purse during dinner…to my dismay. Why was I dismayed? This was a very concrete reminder of the aging process to which none of us is immune as much as we might try to be. Her statement also made [...]
I am proud of the accomplishments that I achieved in my life and I am happy to be a role model for other people with cerebral palsy and with speech disabilities. What I don’t like, however, is being considered a token disabled man. What I consider being a token is people thinking of me as [...]
I’m very excited to announce another new accessory being released from DynaVox – the Xpress Shoulder Strap.
The Xpress Shoulder Strap is compatible with the handle that has been shipping with the Xpress device so that you can connect them together to make a longer strap, or disconnect the handle and only use the shoulder strap. [...]
Two extremely useful buttons I program on virtually all my clients’ speech devices are variations on call chimes. They are included in the AlphaCore page set that I designed for people with ALS that is offered through DynaVox Mayer-Johnson (so now I don’t need to program them over and over again – Yay!). AlphaCore runs [...]
In my last blog post, I talked about the difficulty some individuals who have had a stroke or TBI have accepting AAC. This time, I’d like to look at the issue of acceptance from the perspective of family members. For many individuals who have had a stroke or TBI, support from the communication partner is [...]
Yvonne, a colleague here at United Cerebal Palsy of Greater Houston, has a mantra, “Always have a backup plan.” This rings true as an AAC user and as someone just trying to make her way in today’s difficult society. Having an AAC device can be a great asset to any user. However, what happens when [...]
To finish my degree, I am doing my internship with DynaVox Mayer-Johnson. I started during the spring quarter and will be done during the summer quarter. I’m the Communications and Awareness intern and I love it. Ultimately, I would like to talk to /work with people who have never been around people with disabilities before. [...]
A while back, I wrote a blog called “This Blog is for the Birds.” I am a member of the Audubon Society and I live in Cape Coral in Southwest Florida. We have the unique pleasure of having the largest population of Athene cunicularia or Burrowing Owls in the state of Florida. There are over [...]
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