Microboards Australia

🎉 October is (was) AAC Awareness Month! 💬

In October we celebrated Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) — the many ways people communicate beyond spoken words.

AAC supports people who may not use verbal speech for all their communication needs to express themselves and connect with others. It can include gestures, key word sign, communication boards, speech-generating devices, writing, or typing — and much more.

At its heart, AAC is about ensuring everyone has a voice and can be heard, understood, and included. But more importantly perhaps is the knowledge that AAC is mostly about supporting and meeting our well-being and body brain needs for connection. Without being immersed in environment that support processing, concretion and interaction, we experience chronic stress.

💜 Communication is powerful.
Everyone has the right to express their thoughts and feelings, make choices about their life, and form meaningful relationships. AAC empowers people to take part in conversations, share their stories, and connect with their communities in their own way. AAC forms the platform to help people process the world, language, their internal and external experiences.

This October and in fact for all months of the year, let’s come together to celebrate every voice — because communication access is central to EVERYTHING.

At Microboards Australia, we’re proud to support inclusive communication and the right of every person to be heard.
We do this in so many ways. Through individual support to learning groups and training.

This is also why we partnered with Curtin University to develop the Post Graduate Certificate in Complex Communication Needs, focussing on the knowledge and skills that underlies what being communication capable really means.

Next week, Jaq, Eli and Debbie are off to talk to people at the ASID conference about two really important themes.

One is the role of lived experience education and leadership. Eli and Ben Keely lead a significant part of the presentation, challenging the notion that expertise lies with professionals and dominant narratives of non disabled academics.

The other is about the really really important role of understanding body brain experiences when trying to understand and reduce people's stress. Again Eli will talk a fair bit about this and the impact this has had on his life leading to where he is at today in advocating for other people with disability and having the great life that he does.

If you know of anyone attending the conference, please let them know we will be there and if you are there make sure you seek us out to say hi. We are really looking forward to connecting, learning and sharing.