Reviewing the book: Communication Alternatives in Autism
An edited volume from McFarland, reviewed in the Review of Disability Studies, collects first-person and clinical accounts of typing and spelling approaches in one place.
Communication Alternatives in Autism: Perspectives on Typing and Spelling Approaches (Peña, ed.) gathers essays by nonspeaking autistic authors, family members, and practitioners alongside chapters that engage the research literature. The Review of Disability Studies' review is sympathetic but not uncritical.
What the reviewer credits
The book treats typing and spelling not as a single method but as a family of practices — RPM, S2C, supported typing, independent typing — with different histories, philosophies, and evidence bases. It centers the voices of the people doing the typing, which most academic literature still does not.
It also takes seriously the motor account: that for many nonspeaking autistic people, the barrier to communication is not language but the body. That framing aligns with the broader trajectory of autism research over the last fifteen years.
Where the reviewer pushes back
The book does not fully engage with the message-passing literature that has driven mainstream skepticism. The reviewer wants more methodological humility about what individual essays can and cannot establish, and a clearer separation between strong claims about communication and the evidence behind specific methods.
Even with those caveats, the review treats the volume as a serious contribution and a good entry point for clinicians and researchers who want to understand why families and nonspeaking adults find these methods worth defending.