'Pseudoscience,' really?

Assisted Communication (AC) — the umbrella for S2C, RPM, the Spellers Method, supported typing, and FC — has evolved over time. Today, it is a set of teaching practices grounded in motor learning, AAC, and disability accommodation. Skills build with practice; partner contact may be faded; outcomes vary with regulation, time, and level of partner training.

"Pseudoscience" is not a description of unsettled evidence; it is a rhetorical move that ends conversations. It also depends on conflating every AC approach with 1990s FC — a move ASHA's own position statement leans on heavily, and one the contemporary peer-reviewed literature (e.g., the January 2026 Autism Research paper on the path to independent typing) does not support. The honest version of the critique is: these methods have open empirical questions and an uneven historical track record. Both are true. Neither makes the field pseudoscientific.

What "evidence-based" actually means

Critics often say AC is "not evidence-based." That phrase is doing two very different jobs at once, and it is worth pulling them apart.

The narrow usage means "empirically validated treatment" — a category from a specific corner of clinical psychology that requires multiple randomized controlled trials with manualized protocols and homogeneous diagnostic groups. By that definition, most of what speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and special educators do every day is also not "evidence-based." Nor are most accommodations under the ADA. The standard was designed for a particular kind of question and does not transfer cleanly to communication access for nonspeaking people with significant motor differences.

The broader — and authoritative — usage is the one ASHA itself defines. Evidence-based practice has three pillars:

1. Best available external research evidence — peer-reviewed studies, including the modern eye-tracking, motor-planning, and outcomes literature, not only the 1990s message-passing studies.
2. Clinical expertise — the trained judgment of the practitioner working with this person, in this body, on this day.
3. Client / patient / family values, preferences, and lived experience — including the preferences of the nonspeaking person receiving support.

AC has standing in all three pillars. Critics who say it is "not evidence-based" almost always mean it does not satisfy the narrow first pillar's strictest version — and even then, only by ignoring contemporary studies. They rarely say so out loud, because the broader EBP framework is the one their own professional bodies endorse.

Calling something "pseudoscience" because it does not meet a standard that most of clinical practice also does not meet is not a scientific argument. It is a rhetorical one.