Why Facilitated Communication, Spelling to Communicate, and Spellers Method and Variants Warrant Authorship Testing: Countering Misinformation and Applying a Human Rights Lens in Response to Recent Arguments Against Message-Passing Tests

Purpose: In this commentary, we respond to an article written by autism parent David Kaufer and entitled “WHY MESSAGE-PASSING IS INVALID: The Test Designed to Fail Nonspeaking Autistic People.” Method: We analyzed the claims made by Kaufer through a human rights lens and from the viewpoint of the authors having extensive disciplinary knowledge across linguistics, speech-language pathology, and educational psychology in the fields of autism, language, behavior, augmentative and alternative communication, and motor speech disorders. Three have provided expert testimony in several legal or educational cases involving authorship testing, and all have recently published guidance on authorship testing in support of human rights for minimally or nonspeaking individuals. Results: Kaufer offers no confirming or disconfirming evidence for his claims in opposition to authorship testing, and his article is erroneous and of concern in repeatedly mischaracterizing authorship tests. Authorship tests are not psychological tests and do not measure psychological states, cognition, language skills, or motor planning skills. Rather, authorship tests are a commonsense way to determine who the author of messages constructed using Facilitated Communication (FC), Spelling to Communicate, or other variants. Furthermore, a speech, limb, or body apraxia in an autistic person—even if present—would not prevent that person from being able to reliably point to answer questions in a message-passing test. Conclusions: The safeguarding of human rights of people who are minimally or nonspeaking is of the utmost importance. Considering the harms of facilitator control over messages produced using FC or its variants and associated human rights violations, access to authorship testing should be considered a human right and, as such, provided to every person subjected to these techniques.