How ableism impacts people who need and use AAC.

I was born with a neuromuscular disability. Ever since I was a child, I encountered and experienced ableism, but I did not have the word for it. It was not until I was in my twenties when I started to read disability studies and sociology that I had a better framework for understanding how the world operates. Learning about systemic ableism as a form of oppression was a turning point. I realized that not only was the physical world never built for me, but the entire sociopolitical apparatus is centered on normative bodies and behaviors that uphold white supremacy and hypercapitalism, deeming disabled people as deviant, unproductive, and less than human. In June 2022, I was hospitalized with a punctured lung, aspiration pneumonia, and malnourishment. I came home from the hospital with an irrevocably altered body, unable to eat, drink, or speak. I was left to face a new reality of being a nonspeaking person in a world that privileges speaking and hearing as primary ways of communicating. While I am still evolving and discovering new aspects of life without speech, I believe AAC users can collectively bend conventional modes of communication, practice crip time, teach speaking people to slow the fuck down, and have us centered instead of at the margins. Nonspeaking people belong in public, holding court in conversations, doing our thing, our access needs respected, and being our full selves unapologetically.