Max's talker...

It's Spring Break and Max is watching plenty of his favorite movies along with a few new ones.  This afternoon as he was watching his opera I tried to get video of him using his AAC device.  He is so quick with it, it's sometimes difficult to see how he's making it work. Add that to he does NOT want me taking his video lately, and it's not the best example...but still neat to see him in action.

Max is an auditory step scanner. This means he touches one switch button (red) to step through his choices.  He listens to all the choices, and then selects what he wants to say with the yellow switch button. He has memorized most of what is in his computer and often gets me to menu areas I didn't remember existed to say what is on his mind.



I convinced him to let me "interview" him for the people because they wanted to know how he uses his talker. 



In this third video he's hamming it up for us, playing a game, and telling me to go get his ipad. I think he just was tired of me talking on top of his opera music.



And finally, this is how he will sometimes use his talker when he's getting tired.  He wants us to support his hand and then he presses our hand into his switches.  Or he will hold his right hand still and use his left hand.  Or he will use all three hands to navigate his switches.



He tells me at the end of the video "end interviewing", so I turned it off.

Hopefully this gives you all a better idea of how Max uses his AAC device to communicate.  He's always changing it up, so I tried to get a good picture of all the ways he accesses his switches.