Assisted Communication (AC).
An umbrella term for supported, neuromotor-informed practices that let nonspeaking and unreliably speaking people use written language. Several distinct approaches live under it — they are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were is the central error of the older critique.
Many people with whole-body apraxia, severe motor planning differences, or unreliable speech know exactly what they want to say and cannot reliably get their body to produce it. Assisted Communication (AC) is the umbrella term for the family of practices that build that motor pathway: structured teaching, text-based output, and transitional supports that fade as the learner's body takes over.
AC is the term used in the contemporary peer-reviewed literature — including the January 2026 Autism Research paper on the path to independent typing — and in current expert-witness and ADA work. We use it as the headline framing on this site so that the distinct approaches inside it (S2C, RPM, the Spellers Method, supported typing, FC) can be discussed on their own terms rather than collapsed into a single, decades-old caricature.
Methods directory
A chronological list of the most prevalent methods — FC, RPM, S2C, and the Spellers Method — with links to each program's own site. Not an exhaustive list; explore them for yourself.
Read →Facilitated communication (FC) — history and context
FC is one approach under the AC umbrella, with a contested history. Read what it actually was, what changed, and why conflating every AC approach with 1990s FC is the central error of the older critique.
Read →Coaching supports (not a method)
Auditory cues, gestural and directional prompts, motor coaching, regulation support, and hand-over-hand — the transitional in-session supports that should be faded ASAP.
Read →