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 ![[Horizontal Rule]](/webart/nav_rule.gif){kind=small}            Click here to learn about |
 ![[----------------Horizontal Rule----------------]](/webart/hrule.gif){kind=small}  1.Message from the AuthorWhen I was growing up in the nineteen-forties and fifties life was very simple for people with speech disabilities. If you were lucky you got hooked up with a speech therapist ---that's what they were called in those days---and you were subjected to several hours of intense articulation and breath work a week. That was it. You either learned to talk or you didn't. I had my last appointment with a
speech therapist somewhere in the mid-fifties and then got on with my life.
When I reconnected with the field twenty years later, I was amazed. Everything
had changed. Speech therapists were now called speech-language pathologists
and learning how to talk wasn't considered the primary goal of the work. And
there were tools: letter boards, picture boards, and even crude speech synthesizers.
I surveyed all of this while the words of a rock song rang through my head, "Something's happenin' here/What it is ain’t exactly clear."16 What it was was augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and it has been a part of my life ever since. In this, the premier issue of Alternatively Speaking, you will read some very basic stuff about AAC. Things like just what is augmentative and alternative communication anyway? I think there is a lot of confusion about the basic concepts of AAC. Everybody talks about it, but few know quite what it is. Also, in all the issues of AS you'll notice that the "you" I refer to is the consumer. This reminds us who is at the center of our work. When you finish this issue of AS, you won't be ready for graduate school, but you'll be able to carry on a more satisfying conversation with an AAC professional the next time you run into one. This article appears in AS Volume 1, # 1. You may order this issue by clicking on Ordering Home Page Online Ordering 
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