AAC: Augmentative or Alternative Communication. Look! I learned a new acronym this week. Is it or Alternative or and Alternative? Hmmm. Who cares? It’s not like a speech pathologist is reading this or anything. What I do know is that the communication software I use, EZKeys, falls into this type of software.

Anyway, after reading last week’s post, Jen had a good idea to make a short video showing how my computer and EZKeys works. Unfortunately, it was a GREAT idea but a little too late. So, I spent about 14 hours Googling for programs and trying to figure out a way to make a video of my actual screen showing how I use EZKeys. I even watched several How-To YouTube videos created by what sounded like 12-year-olds. They used words like “simple” and “easy” but I found the process to be “complicated” and “frustrating”. I ended up scrapping that project because: 1. Who needs the aggravation? Not me. And 2. Is a 37 second video worth 27 hours of research and headaches? Probably not. The end result was this lousy, poor-resolution video created by our webcam that was propped up by a shoebox. Here it is, pretty exciting stuff, try not to nod off:

As you can see (sort of), things in my world move kind of slow. It’s funny, whenever I’m in a group of people, like being with my family, the conversation moves pretty fast and I don’t. When I want to give my two cents worth on the current topic, it takes me a few minutes to type it out and by then the conversation has moved on. So when I finally finish with my point, I blurt it out and watch as people hopefully remember what the heck we were all talking about three minutes ago. Another thing is that even though people are real good about including me in the conversation, I’m never really part of the conversation (probably because I can’t talk!). Because of this, I’m always interrupting someone, even though I don’t mean to. I’m getting better about hitting my “talk” button only when Jen is speaking because she can’t stay mad at me for long – we’re married to each other. Sorry Jen!