Authorship testing: why the bar has always been rigged
Imagine being told that your job, your medical decisions, and your civil rights all depend on whether you can pass an unfamiliar test, in an unfamiliar room, on demand. Now imagine being told that if you fail, you do not get to communicate at all.
Authorship testing — the demand that a nonspeaking communicator prove, on the spot, that the words coming out of their letterboard are their own — is treated by critics as a neutral scientific requirement. It is not neutral. It is a uniquely high bar applied to one population, in conditions designed to make them fail, with no fair comparator and no consequence for the test designers if they are wrong.
We test nothing else this way. A speaking child is not asked to prove authorship before they are allowed to say "I'm scared." A typing adult is not asked to pass a blinded message-passing trial before their email counts. The asymmetry is the point.
What a fair authorship standard would look like
- Use the person's regular partner, in their regular environment, with their regular supports.
- Score across repeated trials over weeks, not a single high-stakes session.
- Compare the person's performance against their own baseline, not against a typing-fluent norm.
- Look at the full content of what they produce — vocabulary, syntax, idiosyncrasy, references the partner could not predict — not just one-shot stimulus recall.
- Pre-register protocols with nonspeaking adults who actually use the methods as co-designers.
- Hold an absence of evidence as exactly that — not as proof of absence.
The legal angle
Civil-rights attorneys working in communication access are increasingly framing authorship-test gatekeeping as itself a violation of the ADA. The argument: when a state, school, or provider conditions someone's right to communicate on passing a test designed for a population they are not part of, under conditions known to suppress their performance, the gatekeeping is the harm. We expect this argument to win, repeatedly, over the next decade.
What we are asking for
Not the abolition of skepticism. Real skepticism — applied symmetrically, with care, by people willing to be wrong. We are asking critics to design the test they would accept if their own ability to speak depended on the outcome. Most of them, when pressed, cannot.
Until they can, the right default is to let people communicate.