Getting Started with AAC at Home

Three things to know before you start

AAC does not stop speech developing

This is the most common worry and the evidence is consistent: introducing AAC does not suppress natural speech, and is associated with gains in it. It reduces frustration, provides a language model, and gives a person a reason to communicate — all of which support speech rather than competing with it.

There are no prerequisites

Nobody has to demonstrate a set of skills to "earn" a way to communicate. The old idea that a child must first show cause and effect, or a certain mental age, before being given AAC has been abandoned. Communication is a right, not a reward for progress.

The device is the easy part

Systems very rarely fail because the wrong device was chosen. They fail because nobody modelled it, the vocabulary was never adjusted, or it lived in a bag. What you do in the first month matters more than what you bought.

Model, model, model

This is the whole thing. A child hears tens of thousands of spoken words before saying one. If they only ever see their device used when someone is asking them to use it, they have almost no model at all.

So use it yourself, out loud, all day, in ordinary conversation:

Point to go on the board as you say "let's go".
Hit more as you say "do you want more?"
Comment on your own life — "I like this", "I'm tired", "that's finished".
Model roughly one word beyond where they are: if they use one word, model two.

Model without expecting a response. No requirement to copy, no prompting, no waiting for them to do it. Just showing what the tool is for. This is the single most important sentence in this handout.

Make it available every waking minute

The system goes wherever the person goes — every room, the car, the park, the bath (a laminated copy), school, daycare, grandparents' house.
Never removed as a consequence. Taking away someone's communication is never an appropriate response to behaviour.
Charged, mounted or strapped so it does not depend on someone remembering to carry it.
Always have a low-tech backup. Devices break, run out of battery and get left behind, and communication should not stop when they do.

Give real reasons to communicate

Offer choices of two, using the system to present them.
Keep something desirable in sight but out of reach.
Give small amounts so there is a reason to ask for more.
Pause in a familiar routine or song and wait expectantly.
Do something wrong on purpose and let them protest.
Honour everything. If they say stop, stop. If they say no, accept it. If a request is met by the world responding, the system becomes worth using. If it is ignored or overridden, it becomes decoration.

Vocabulary: teach core words first

The instinct is to fill a device with nouns — foods, toys, animals. But about 80 per cent of what any of us says is made up of a few hundred small words: go, stop, more, want, like, not, my, you, it, that, help, finished, again, different.

Core words are powerful because they work everywhere. More works at dinner, in the park, during a story and in the bath. A picture of a specific toy works once. Start with a small set of core words and use them constantly, rather than a hundred nouns used occasionally.

Wait longer than feels natural

Building a message on a device takes far longer than speaking one. Count to ten in your head. Say nothing. Do not finish their sentence, do not guess out loud, and do not take over the screen. Silence feels awkward and is doing the work.

Common mistakes

Turning it into a test. "Show me ball. Where's ball? Come on, find ball." This makes the device a demand rather than a voice.
Hand-over-hand prompting. Moving someone's hand to a button teaches compliance, not communication, and it takes away their control of their own voice. Point to the symbol yourself instead.
Only using it for requests. If the device only gets snacks, that is all it will ever mean. Model commenting, protesting, joking, greeting and complaining.
Keeping it "for therapy". A system used for one hour a week is a system that will be abandoned.
Changing everything constantly. Motor memory matters — moving symbols around resets the learning. Keep positions stable as vocabulary grows.

A realistic first month

Week 1 — you use it, they watch. No expectations at all. Pick five core words and use them constantly.
Week 2 — keep modelling; start engineering a few genuine reasons to communicate. Accept any attempt, including an accidental one, as real.
Week 3 — extend into new places and people. Show grandparents, teachers and support workers how to model, not how to prompt.
Week 4 — review. What is being used? What is missing? What did they try to say and could not? Add vocabulary based on what they reached for.

Expect months, not weeks, before spontaneous use. That is not failure; it is the normal timeline of learning a language.

Everyone needs to be on board

Write down the plan and share it with every adult in the person's life — both parents, siblings old enough, grandparents, the daycare, the school, EAs, support workers, respite staff. A system that works in one house and not another teaches that communication depends on who is in the room.