An inquiry into the technologies of speech-based societies.
An article by DJ Savarese on communicating in all kinds of ways outside of what speech supremacy can think of , and the ableism and speech supremacy built into high-tech AAC systems.
When we choose not to use AAC devices—with their stiff, generic, confining, and inauthentic prerecorded messages—society usually stops offering us other ways to connect and instead declares us “uneducable,” “untrainable,” “asocial,” “unempathetic” and “willingly walled off from the world.”
I have come to think of ableism as the cultivated garden of a speech-based society. Many assistive technologies assume the disabled are outsiders, striving to inhabit that cultivated garden. These technologies don’t change the world we live in; they just allow a few of us to climb up and over the garden wall, helping us pass or pose as independent, able-bodied, speakers. Once in the garden, we are seen as validating the status quo, further fortifying the very walls that many of us hope to dismantle with other technologies, other modes of communicating, other ways of being.
People use the verbal/nonverbal binary to render nonspeakers unheard and therefore invisible. In a speech-centric, hearing-privileged world, we are always seen as disabled, lacking. “Success stories,” maybe; “inspirations,” perhaps—but always on others’ terms.
A high achiever in mainstream education from kindergarten through college, I had come to communicate almost entirely in written English. What, I wondered, might I have lost in the process? I began engaging with the visual artwork of various autistics, eventually compelled by the drawings, paintings, and sculptures of seven artists to write a poetic series. By the last poem, modes of communication had begun to blur as I proudly tell five-year-old impressionist artist Iris Grace that “I’m no longer visual exactly; nor am I verbal. When I type, my fingers speak / with an accent.”
