Techniques for Enhancing Communication Productivity in AAC

This paper summarizes selected findings on approaches to increasing the rate of communicatively appropriate responses in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Six approaches—efficient keyboard layouts, reduced keys keyboards, Minspeak with Words Strategy, enlarged keys keyboards, abbreviation expansion, and lexical prediction—are reviewed and rated, using seven criteria—learning needs, cognitive-linguistic processing requirements, perceptual-motor processing requirements, vocabulary size covered, rate increase potential, effort reduction potential, and availability. For literate AAC users, the alternative keyboard layouts described in this paper offer a simple and cost-effective technique that rate highly on all seven criteria. The other approaches to productivity enhancement in AAC have both significant advantages and drawbacks that must be weighed for each individual AAC consumer.