Shared principles.
Different approaches, different lineages, different practitioners — but five principles that show up in every credible version of this work.
Last reviewed: · Reviewed by: FacilitatedCommunication.com editorial team
Facilitated communication (FC), Spelling to Communicate (S2C), the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), the Spellers Method, and supported typing are not synonyms. They come from different teachers, and use different tools and techniques.
Conflating them is the central error of the older critique — and we keep them distinct on this site for that reason.
At the same time, they overlap. Practitioners, families, and communicators across methods have converged on a shared set of commitments. Naming those commitments lets visitors see the common ground without letting critics define the relationships between the approaches.
1. Presumed competence
Every approach starts from the same assumption: the person in front of you understands more than their body lets them show. Communication instruction proceeds as if cognition is intact and the work is to build a reliable motor path for expression. This is the opposite of a deficit-first stance.
2. Communication access
Access to expressive communication is treated as foundational — upstream of education, employment, healthcare, and self-determination. The Americans with Disabilities Act frames effective communication as a civil right, and these methods exist in that frame.
3. Motor differences
For many nonspeaking and unreliably speaking people, the barrier between intention and expression is movement, not cognition. Whole-body or global apraxia decouples what a person means to do from what their body actually executes. This is a well-described neurological phenomenon — see the neuromotor framework — and it changes what counts as appropriate instruction.
4. Accommodations and support — that fade
Physical, postural, sensory, and verbal support are tools to bridge intention and execution while the motor pathway is being learned. Every credible practitioner targets independence: support is calibrated to what the learner needs in the moment and faded as their body's reliability grows. See motor learning and fading for how this works in practice.
5. Autonomy and human dignity
The communicator owns the message. Decisions about what to type, when to stop, what to share, and how to live belong to them — not to the partner, the program, or the family. This commitment is what separates communication instruction from compliance training, and it is shared across every approach this site covers.
The methods, side by side
For a directory of the most prevalent methods with links to each program's own site, see Methods. For the history of facilitated communication, see What is FC.
Shared principles are the bridge. They do not erase the differences between approaches, and they do not collapse them under any single label.