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Facilitated Communication

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FC Past and Present: A Now-Normalized Routine that Solves Nothing

A few weeks ago, I encountered something that surprised me: a full-length documentary about profound autism. Even though it came out in 2023, I’d somehow never heard of it—and neither had any of my autism cronies. Furthermore, from its initial scenes all the way to its ending, it lived up to its promise as a realistic portrayal of the trials of life with profound autism. It was, in other words, a huge departure from the facilitated communication and Telepathy miracle documentaries (Spellers; The Telepathy Tapes) that have dominated the electromagnet spectrum at least since 2023. Entitled “Beyond”, directed by Thiago Dadatt, and posted a year ago on YouTube as BEYOND (Feature-length documentary film about severe autism), (it currently has 223K views), it showcases Tamara Mark, a professional dancer and voiceover artist who is a single parent to two profoundly autistic non-speakers, Ian and Harry, currently in their early twenties.

Beyond opens with the sounds of strident violins and a montage of Mark and her two sons, who, highly excitable and often distressed, seem to be in constant motion. The first scene is Thanksgiving, 2020, at Mark’s home in Pasadena, California. Mark is alternating between preparing dinner, speaking with the documentary team, and following after one or the other of her sons in response to their cries of distress. We learn that the state-funded, in-home support she gets falls far short of what she needs and that she pays out of pocket for more. We learn that Harry was in a residential placement but had come home at the start of the Pandemic. We hear about sibling strife, self-injurious behaviors, and seizures; about Mark’s isolation and sleep deprivation (“Three hours a day, if I’m lucky”); about the three-year-long waitlist for residential placements in California; and about the many people she knows across the country in similar situations, some of them “being injured by their kid” or seeing their kids die after being placed in a home. Finally, Mark sits down to dinner all by herself at the table, takes a short breather, and wishes the cameraman, in a combination of wistfulness and irony, a “Happy Thanksgiving.”

The film then flashes back to Mark’s career as a dancer. While it continued to play in the background, I started multitasking. I listened with half an ear as the film turned back to Mark’s sons Ian and Harry, their births, their symptoms and diagnoses, the emotional roller coaster, the challenging behaviors, the seizures, the urge to fix things. Then came the litany of therapies—chelation, Chinese herbs, chiropractic therapy, holistic and holographic healing, John of God healing, Son-Rise, equestrian therapy, dolphin therapy, and occupational therapy—some of which were new to me. I began listening out for any mention of FC, but wasn’t really expecting it: there had been no letterboards in sight during those Thanksgiving scenes. The boys communicated entirely through vocalizations and body language, and Mark communicated with them only through bodily contact, body language, and simple phrases (“What is it?”; ”It’s alright;” You’re all right.”). In other words, authentic, independent, un-facilitated communication.

But then suddenly, at around the 30-minute mark, my attention is yanked back by a telltale word: “typing.” Someone is reporting on how Harry had been typing during a lesson about dolphins. I abruptly close several windows that were occluding the video, and there before my eyes, debriefing with Mark, is none other than Darlene Hanson. Identified here as “long time Ian and Mark’s speech & language pathologist,” Hanson’s actual specialty is facilitated communication. Considered a master facilitator, she’s been facilitating since the early 1990s. Her clients include Sue Rubin of Autism is a World, Peyton Goddard of I am Intelligent, and Emily Grodin of I have Been Buried Under Years of Dust. Hanson is also the second author of the Cardinal et al. study that Janyce has been blogging about (starting here).

But even though Beyond, as it turns out, includes FC, it still distinguishes itself. Unlike Autism is a World, I am Intelligent, I have Been Buried Under Years of Dust—and unlike the movie Spellers and countless other accounts of FC—Beyond presents FC as just another rather unremarkable part of life with profound autism. There are no breakthrough moments, no revelations of unexpected intelligence, no moves away from life skills and immediate needs towards academics or poetry writing or FC advocacy or any of the other motions that non-speaking autistics are routinely put through after they start being FCed.

Rather, in response to Hanson’s report about Harry’s interest in the dolphins lesson, Mark’s reaction is simply to emphasize that “Communication is all that I ever wanted” and that “I should be doing this every day.” Hanson’s response is telling:

Yeah, it’s going to be a dance, you know, because you don’t know what days it’s going to be a good day. So you can’t schedule me to come over on Tuesdays at 10. Because Harry doesn’t follow that schedule.

Facilitated communication, so much more elusive and tentative than in other accounts, depends here on Harry’s mood and Hanson’s availability.

The FC scene that follows the debrief comes across as a relatively unremarkable clip from an established routine. It begins with Hanson approaching Harry as he makes distressed vocalizations. Hanson takes his hand and says “You are upset about something... Can you say Hi?...” There is a pause.

Hanson: “Hi, Harry. Good to see ya. Want to say something?”

She holds up a colorful letterboard, puts her hand on his arm just above his elbow and the typing begins.

Hanson: “Beautiful, Keep your rhythm. We should fir—first“

The letters “WE SHOULD FIRST” appear on the screen, ostensibly as a transcript of what Harry just typed. (The letterboard moves a lot and it’s hard to see which letters are actually selected.)

Hanson: “Mm hmm. We should first...”

The letters “TYPE ABOUT” appear on the screen.

Hanson: “About what? What should we type about?...”

Harry moves away and makes noises.

Hanson: “Oh! Something important. Sounds like it’s something important. Feel free to share it.”

Harry thrusts a hand out and in as if repeatedly throwing something.

Hanson: “Go over here? You want me to go over here? Like this?”

Hanson moves away from Harry. Harry makes a vocalization that sounds kind of like “more.” “More?” Hanson moves further away.

Hanson: “Alright, so think about what you’re going to tell me that we should really type about.”

Harry is now sitting down in a chair, facing away from Hanson. She approaches him.

Hanson: “I’m going to come over and see if you want to finish that thought. Ok, buddy?”

The scene cuts to Hanson once again holding the letterboard in front of Harry, her hand back on his arm.

Hanson: “To what? V-e-r- Very? T-i-r Very tired... Of... “

The words VERY TIRED OF appear on the screen. Harry makes a vocalization and pulls his arm away from the letterboard.

Hanson: “Very tired of? You think you can finish it? ... Do you want me to leave? Would you finish this and then I’ll leave.” (She puts her hand on his shoulder) “How about that? Can you try?”

I find it quite telling the incentive to finish the FC session is the facilitator’s departure.

Hanson puts her hand on his shoulder and adds, “I really want to know what you’re tired of, buddy.”

Harry makes a short vocalization.

Hanson: “Okay! Can you tell me and then I’ll go?”

She takes his hand.

Hanson: “Try, try, try. Very tired of what?”

She has her hand back on his shoulder and moves the letterboard around.

Hanson: “b-e-I, being... i- n, in... p-a-i... Very tired of being in pain.”

Bit by bit, the message VERY TIRED OF BEING IN PAIN has been appearing on the screen.

Hanson: “Pain. There you go. Now I can go because you hit that period. Thanks.”

Hanson says those words with enthusiasm. She then pulls the letterboard away and gets up. A moment passes before she expresses any sympathy.

Hanson: “I can only imagine, Harry. When I’m in pain. Man. That’s rough. It does--you just like, you want it to stop, huh?... I get that. I’m sorry. I know your mom is working on that.”

(It is eventually decided that Harry is suffering from tooth pain and needs dental surgery.)

Notably absent from these FCed messages is the dazzling vocabulary—“amber,” “kale”, “constellation”—and poignant content—“I love you Mom and Dad”, “I am intelligent”—of many initial FCed messages. To viewers who know little about autism and language development, the messages attributed to Harry may seem unremarkable—or at least not implausible. But implausible they nonetheless are. Every single vocabulary word (“should,” “first,” “very,” “tired,” “pain”), pronoun (“we,” “I”), function word (“about,” “of,” “in”), and morphological inflection (“being”) are well beyond the receptive and expressive vocabularies even of many individuals with somewhat less profound autism (i.e., those with two-word, telegraphic speech).

The next time FC comes up is much later in the movie, in the context of Mark’s attempts to help set up a residential community for adult non-speakers. Here the documentary provides captions about the scarcity and long waiting lists for such programs. Mark needs collaborators, and she travels to San Diego to meet with some other parents. But besides their shared interest in setting up a community, it turns out they all have one other thing in common.

Foreshadowing this shared commonality is the first parent we see: Dawnmarie Gavin, described here as an S2C practitioner (Figuring prominently in the Spellers Documentary, Gaivin will go on to rebrand S2C as the Spellers Method). Like Mark, Gaivin is also a single mother of two non-speaking sons with autism. Another couple also has two non-speaking, S2C-using sons. We hear briefly about their experiences with “spelling” and how one of their boys eventually earned a high school diploma. In fact, all of the parents appear to have S2C-using kids.

Fleeting moments of S2C include Gaivin facilitating out the word “birds” from one of her sons and then asking him “What else could we put on this property?” The group is milling around some land they are considering as a site for the adult community, and there has been some vague talk by the parents about how their children will have input and play leadership roles. But Gaivin’s son’s response to her question is to turn from the letterboard to his brother and grab his hair. Gaivin calmly intervenes, asking the one brother to “open your fingers” and then comforting the other brother, who is crying out in pain, before returning to the first and facilitating out the word “sorry.” There is no talk, even among these S2C believers, of unlocked genius, of starting a Spellers Revolution, or of pursuing advanced degrees in creative writing or neuroscience (to name a few paths taken by other S2Cers). Rather, the discussions center on the logistics and fundraising required to ensure that their children can live out their lives after they are no longer able to care for them.

We have yet to see Mark’s older son, Ian, being facilitated, but towards the end of the documentary Hanson reappears and makes several failed attempts to do so. Ian eventually tosses the letterboard on the ground, but Hanson picks it up later and after a jump cut, with Hanson’s arm on his upper arm and shoulder, Ian has apparently typed out “This is stressful.” He then appears to type out “being home” (we can’t see which letters are actually selected). Hanson expresses sorrow and asks him if there’s anything they can do to make him less stressed at home. Ian then allegedly types (we do not see the process) “in my independent home.” Hanson infers that he wants to live independently. Meanwhile, Ian has made it quite clear that he wants to stop pointing to letters.

As for Mark, she has reconnected with a high school boyfriend who lives in Australia. She takes her first trip away from the two boys, leaving them for several weeks with a team of helpers. Indeed, we see numerous helpers throughout the film: helpers, but not facilitators. Hanson, it appears, is the only person who ever facilitates either of them (a couple of additional moments of Hanson facilitating flash by towards the very end of the movie). There is no evidence that Mark has ever facilitated her sons even once.

The documentary ends on a happy note, but it’s not thanks to an FC miracle. Mark continues to communicate with her sons as before, in simple phrases; the boys continue to communicate back to her in authentic gestures and body language. But Mark has returned from her trip with her boyfriend; he has decided to join the family; and the film’s final scenes are on Thanksgiving of 2021, where Mark is no longer sitting alone at an empty table. The closing captions tell us that Ian is working at a local plant nursery and that Harry had his teeth fixed and is currently pain-free. As for FC, it’s just one more routine event in life with profound autism; it itself has solved nothing, and much of life appears to be continuing more or less as before.

All this makes Beyond more honest than all the other accounts I’ve seen that include FC. But it also makes the FC more insidious. With no explicit introduction and no remarkable moments, seamlessly incorporated into the rest of the documentary, FC appears as totally normalized. This, of course, is also a testament to just how entrenched it’s become. And even without the false revelations of intact genius and spiritual gifts, and even with the continuation of authentic communication between parent and children, FC still, inevitably, supplants authentic communications with false ones. And, as we see in each FC session here, as elsewhere, holding still and pointing to letters while someone hovers over them and holds their arm is something that all the non-speakers clearly find aversive.

Shortly after watching this documentary, I had another set of surprises. Back when my son was first diagnosed, I read all the autism parent memoirs I could get my hands on. Among these were several refreshingly honest memoirs of profound autism: the three “Noah” books by Josh Greenfield and The Small Outsider by Joan Hartin Hundley, all of them published in the 1970s. There was also Craig Schulze’s When Snow Turns to Rain, published in 1993. The latter, in which a boy develops normally, even precociously, until his third year of life, is the most haunting and heart-wrenching of all. But several days ago I had reason to take it off the shelf and review some of its contents.

Like Beyond, When Snow Turns to Rain withholds nothing about the trials of profound autism and the litany of quack treatments (Fenfluramine, Naltrexone) and non-evidence-based therapies (vitamin therapy; Son-Rise) that the parents, in their desperation, try out. In the end, they settle on the program that seemed to best suit their son Jordan: the Boston Higashi School and its “Daily Life Therapy.

A scene from the Higashi School, incidentally, bookends the FC-debunking exposé Prisoners of Silence. A foil to all the scenes elsewhere in the documentary of children being facilitated, here are young children without facilitators hovering over them and holding their arms over Canon Communicators. Instead they stand together in rows as a teacher plays the piano and leads them in “If You’re Happy and You Know It” and “He’s got the Whole World in Hands.” Some of the kids even sing along. And when the scene resumes at the end of the documentary, the voiceover says:

One day, the mysterious condition of autism will be understood and researchers may find a cure. Until then, as the evidence against facilitated communication accumulates, a painful question remains, whether parents and those who care deeply about autistic individuals are choosing to see them as they would like them to be, rather than respecting them for who they are.

One of the closing scenes of Prisoners of Silence: Profoundly autistic children at the Boston Higashi School sing “He’s got the Whole World in his Hands.”

As I finish my scan through When Snow Turns to Rain, I find, just seven pages from the end, the following passage:

Ten, twenty, maybe a hundred disconfirming experiences with treatments for this crazy disorder aren’t sufficient to kill the seed of hope within me. Just as there is for a weed sprouting through a crack in the pavement, there is always a light to reach for. Today, and for several months since I first learned of it in an article in The Harvard Education Review written by Syracuse University Professor of Education Douglas Biklen, “facilitated communication” has been the next flickering glimmer in the distance... (p. 210)

How had I forgotten about this section? Certainly, at the time I first read it back in the late 1990s, I was under the impression that FC had been so fully debunked that it was no longer in use. Was that why this paragraph, and the ones that followed, had made no lasting impression on me?

I read on:

Jill and I have spoken about facilitated communication, and we have done some reading on the subject as well. At this point, we are skeptical.

Schulze proceeds to explain the theory behind FC: the alleged apraxia, the alleged high levels of locked-in literacy skills, and the typical, FC-generated messages: “I am not retarded;” “I want to go to a normal school.” He then writes:

Maybe it’s possible. At some point Jordan knew his letters and even some sight words. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind this information may still survive.

That’s something I never thought of before. Parents with late-onset regressive autism may be especially prone to FC, inasmuch as their kids, pre-regression, had acquired significant amounts of language and perhaps some literacy skills as well.

Shulze continues:

But is it likely? He doesn’t seem to suffer from apraxia; he would certainly be able to pick up a small piece of candy from a collection of similarly shaped objects if given the opportunity, for instance. Does it then make sense that he would be physically unable to push the appropriate keys independently to spell words and create messages if he had the mental capacity to do so? Well, it could be that the task of communicating makes him so anxious that he can’t control his movements. Whatever the likelihood, this prospect is too tantalizing to ignore, and, luckily, I will get an opportunity to see facilitated communication for myself on this very day at Boston Higashi. (p. 211)

I read on, eagerly turning the page:

For some time, one of the students at the school has been using facilitated communication at home. His parents have been so impressed with the results that they have asked the school if they would sponsor a workshop for the staff. They are convinced that the school should investigate the possibilities of this method for their own child and others attending Higashi. The school has allowed two trainers associated with Doug Biklen to conduct this staff development. An added bonus is that approximately fifteen students will be given the opportunity to communicate with these teachers on the Canon Communicator, a small typewriter-like device that is frequently used with this approach. (pp. 211-212)

As I pull into Higashi’s parking lot I have a tremendous feeling of anxiety. Even though I have felt that this idea has been oversold, I can’t help wondering. After all, proponents of this technique are suggesting that not just a few, but most of the children they have worked with can communicate. Even a kid whose abilities have been dormant for five years may succeed. When I think that Biklen’s article appeared not in “New Age Newsletter,” but in The Harvard Educational Review, I wondered even more. (p. 212)

Here we see, yet again, the power and perniciousness of prestige publications promoting facilitated communication.

Schulze meets the trainers at lunch and hears their reports on how the Higashi students did when facilitated:

They claim that the overwhelming majority of the children are communicating in a manner which would be nothing short of miraculous. The children’s reported statements are amazingly similar to the kinds of communication that were attributed to children in the Harvard Education Review article, including claims about the ability to read and think normally, despite being able to express their thoughts in typical ways. (p. 212)

But then Schulze reports on what the Higashi staff said about the training:

Nobody reports that they could unequivocally establish that the children were communicating, and many are put off by the facilitators’ heavy handed hard sell. In fact, these facilitators seem to spend a good deal of time at lunch prodding everyone with questions about how they see their method fitting in with the Higashi program. (p. 213)

Despite this:

These sessions with the Higashi students do seem to convince one of the parents whose child participates. She comes away from the event absolutely certain that her child is communicating and later helps to organize workshops for other parents at the school, one of which Jill attends.

Meanwhile, I borrow one of the Canon Communicators that has been donated to the school to experiment with Jordan and home. (p. 213)

It occurs to me for the first time how integral the Canon Communicator was back then to FC and its marketing. Somehow the notion that the methodology is associated with a dedicated electro-mechanical device seems to lend it some credibility. (As Janyce just told me, the company that marketed it, along with another company that marketed another device associated with FC, were sued for false claims that the devices enable users to communicate through FC—see this report in Quack Watch.) But Schulze takes a more flexible approach:

We also try to interest Jordan in the keyboard of our computer and in identifying letters arranged on a sheet of paper—as they would be on a typewriter, to lend a little portability to our efforts.

For a period of about three weeks, Jill and I work with Jordan in this manner to see if we can elicit from him the kinds of communication that is being reported. The results are mixed at best. At times we think that he is able to identify the letters that form his name; or that he is able to locate the “y” or “n” to answer yes/no questions. He also seems to do better at identifying a specific picture from an array when we hold his hand. But mostly he rejects the whole concept. Coincidentally, he is going through a period where he is particularly tactilely defensive, and he often pulls away his hand and appears agitated when we try to pursue the matter. (p. 213)

I find myself wondering whether this is a complete coincidence.

Assuming that he is actually capable of communicating with us, our experience suggests that Jordan does not have a burning desire to do so. Moreover, the children whose parents claim thy are communicating don’t appear to be behaving any differently. The parents of one child who is facilitating claim that she now reads frequently and types such messages as “My mother isn’t dedicated.” But when I see her at school, she behaves as she always has, namely, jumping up and down and squealing. It seems a little unbelievable that children with little or no instruction in writing and reading have absorbed these skills. It seems even more incredible, however, that after demonstrating the ability to communicate they don’t look or act any differently. (p. 214)

As in Beyond, so too with When Snow Turns to Rain: for all that FC and its variants supposedly unlock, life more or less goes on as normal. And I’m reminded of all those early stars of FC and Rapid Prompting Method and the like who vanished from view—Peyton Goddard, Sue Rubin, Dov Shestak, Emma Zurcher-Long, Carly Fleischmann, and a host of others. As behaviors continue and life goes on more or less as it always has, it’s hard to sustain the illusion over time.

As for the Schulzes in that moment, the illusion goes only so far:

To this writing, Jill and I see the potential of facilitated communication. Indeed, we have tried the method again and again with Jordan over the past few years. But we must be honest in reporting that it hasn’t worked for Jordan. And claims of others that we have observed remain an unproven hypothesis. (p. 214).

In the 1 ½ page epilogue that follows, there is no further mention of FC. As with Beyond, the happy-ish note on which this harrowing memoir ends comes from elsewhere:

It took me six years of wandering the labyrinth of my child’s disorder to realize that the path to joy would lead back to me. I would come to understand through this trial that pinning my hopes for happiness on Jordan’s recovery or on any particular outcome for my life was totally absurd. If the empyrean was to be found at all, it would be located deep within my self, in a core of acceptance and love of life, regardless of its outer dress.

---

REFERENCES

Shulze, Craig. When Snow Turns to Rain. Woodbine House, 1993.

Can HoloLens lessons liberate S2Ced individuals from their facilitators?—plus a recap of Jaswal et al.’s 2023-2025 virtual reality oeuvre

Over the past couple of years, S2C proponent Vikram Jaswal, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the father of an S2C user, and Diwakar Krishnamurthy, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Calgary and the father of an RPM user have co-authored several papers on the development of virtual tools that enable S2C users to virtually select virtual letters rather than pointing to letters on letterboards. Like Jaswal’s other recent papers, each of these begins with purported justifications for S2C as a valid communication method, and each reports instances of allegedly independent communication by S2C users. Like Jaswal’s other papers, therefore, these papers are worth reviewing in detail. In three pervious posts, I discussed Alabood et al. (2024), a study involving a virtual letterboard, or HoloBoard, and Alabood et al. (2025), a study involving the use of virtual letter cubes to spell words.

In my last post, I discussed an additional study in Jaswal’s 2023-2025 virtual reality oeuvre that are relevant to us here at facilitatedcommunication.org: the HoloGaze study (Nazari et al., 2024).  In this study, I turn an earlier study, the HoloLens lessons study (Shahidi, et al., 2023). What makes all these studies relevant to facilitated communication is that, like all the other Jaswal studies we’ve reviewed:

·       They involve language and literacy (some of Jaswal et al.’s other studies instead involve visual games)

·       They appear to show levels of language comprehension that are generally not found in minimally speaking autism, particularly in those with significant motor impairments (see Chen et al., 2024).

(Minimal speakers with autism and significant motor impairments being representative, per Jaswal et al., of the population that their studies are targeting.)

The HoloLens lessons study (Shahidi et al., 2023), with Jaswal and Krishnamurthy listed, respectively, as its fourth and fifth authors, reports on two studies of another virtual reality tool with minimal speakers with autism. Using the virtual environment of the HoloLens 2, the authors developed a “virtual lesson” that presents academic material (verbal and pictographic) in a virtual environment and then tests students on that material through multiple -choice questions.

The HoloLens paper repeats many of the same questionable claims about motor difficulties and regulation challenges in non-speaking autism found in their earlier studies; I won’t repeat them here. The authors then report on a pilot study using the HoloLens. It involved just one participant  (a 19-year-old male who communicates via a letterboard and a “communication partner”) and a virtual lesson about the history of bicycles:

The lesson had 13 questions, 2 questions were two-option questions (one spelling and one comprehension), 6 questions were three-option questions (1 comprehension and 5 spelling a full word questions), and 5 of them were four-option questions (all comprehension).

Despite the fact that the multiple-choice questions ranged from two choices (with a 50% chance of success) to four choices, with the plurality having three choices, the participant performed rather poorly:

The participant took 38 attempts to answer the 13 questions. He had correct responses for 9 of the questions, and thus, 29 of his attempts were unsuccessful.

The authors make no mention of any prompting/cueing on the part of the participant’s communication partner. At the very least, the communication partner couldn’t have provided any cues via a held-up letterboard cues: there was no physical letterboard involved in the Hololens lesson. Might this have been the reason for the participants’ poor failure? What the authors say next is highly suggestive:

Interestingly, on four occasions the participant was asked to answer the question using the physical letterboard immediately after they selected a wrong option in the HoloLens 2 system. In all these instances, the participant selected the correct option on the physical board.

What do the authors conclude from this highly suggestive contrast? Not what many of us would conclude. Instead they write:

Hence, it was clear that there were aspects of our design that the participant was not comfortable with.

The authors don’t consider the more obvious explanation: namely, what was really going on were a series of inadvertent tests of facilitator control, something akin to message-passing tests. As the authors’ account makes clear, the participant picked out incorrect answers when there was no letterboard for their facilitator to hold up, and then picked out correct answers as soon as there was.

Via the held-up letterboard, the participant answered “follow-up questions” to help the researchers to “better understand how our design needed to be modified.” Among other messages, the S2C-generated feedback included the message that

it was hard to handle questions that presented more than three choices since the limited field-of-view of the HoloLens 2 meant that more than three buttons could not be seen simultaneously with a horizontal layout.

The follow-up study, accordingly, avoided multiple-choice questions with more than three options. Of course, they could instead have made the buttons small enough to allow more than three options. Why they opted against this obvious alternative goes unexplained.

The follow-up study involved “five nonspeaking autistic participants between 9 and 24 years of age” who “were clients of the same communication partner.” In other words, like the participant in the pilot study, they were all S2C users.

This study also used the bicycle history lesson, but now there were “9 questions: 6 with two options only, and 3 with three options.” In other words, this study had an even higher chance of randomly selected correct answers than the first study did. Furthermore, most of the questions were about spelling rather than comprehension:

Five of these questions involve choosing a letter to spell an entire word ("Hobby") in sequential order and one question asked for the first letter of the word "Bicycle" (B). The other three questions were comprehension questions related to the content of the lesson.”

In addition, their communication partners were allowed to prompt them:

As a form of encouragement, the communication partner intervened with verbal prompts, e.g., "go for it", "you almost got it", "just a bit slower", and "withdraw your finger", whenever the participants had repeated trouble with any given interaction.

These are the kinds of prompts that, on their own, without accompanying board movements, can be enough to direct those being subjected to them towards the correct choices—especially when there are only two or three options. Nonetheless, the results, while better than in the pilot study, still showed high error rates:

Of the 36 questions posed, participants were correct on the first attempt for 24 questions, correct on the second attempt for 7 questions, and did not respond correctly even on the second attempt for 5 questions.

As far as the authors are concerned, however, these results aren’t a reflection of spelling and comprehension challenges but, rather, of the way the participants moved their hands when interacting with the virtual environment:

Based on our thematic analysis, there were four different causes. Overshooting (6 out of 12) was the most frequent reason for the failed first attempt. With overshooting, a participant’s hand movements toward a particular button were too fast to be recognized by the device. Following an overshoot, participants typically triggered the wrong button. Another category of incorrect response involved atypical gestures. For example, S3 tried to press a button with all fingers and this was not recognized by the device... The third category we coded was accidental trigger. For example, S2 had their hand extended and moving even before the buttons appeared. When the buttons appeared, the device registered the participant’s moving fingers resulting in an unintended press. The "Other" category represents cases where the participants genuinely seemed to press the wrong button. There was one instance each of atypical gesture (S3) and accidental trigger (S2) in their second attempts.

Curiously, the authors don’t tell us how many instances of “Other” there were. But even if the rate of truly erroneous selections was as low as the authors suggest, the combination of choosing from just three options and facilitator cues like “you almost got it” and “withdraw your finger” are probably enough to induce correct responses.

Like the HoloGaze study, the HoloLens lessons study inadvertently shows us how errors decrease when facilitators have control. In the HoloGaze study, it was the eye-gaze selection of virtual letters vs. the usual S2C-generated letter selection: it’s much easier to cue where someone points their index finger on a held-up letterboard than to cue where someone points their eyes in a virtual environment. In the HoloLens lessons studies, it’s the pilot study, where no verbal prompts were reported vs. the follow-up study, where the authors reported four examples of verbal prompts, some of them quite explicit.  Furthermore, both studies primarily assessed spelling rather than language comprehension—and the first HoloLens lessons study, tantalizingly, excludes the results from its one comprehension exercise: the optional open-ended questions activity.

Returning to two studies we reviewed earlier in this series, we see a similar contrast in error rates under conditions of high vs. low facilitator influence. In the LetterBox study (Alabood et al., 2025), where facilitators had no access to the virtual environment, participants did not do so well and their successes could be explained by the familiarity of the questions, while in the HoloBoard study (Alabood et al., 2024), where the facilitators interacted with their clients in the virtual environment, but did not hold the board, participants did better, though not as well they did as in the held-up letterboard versions of S2C that they were used to. Clearly most of them weren’t ready to graduate to S2C’s stationary letters stage—this being S2C’s final stage, after users “graduate” to held-up keyboards, where the keyboards are placed on stationary surfaces. There are a few S2Ced individuals who do graduate to this stage, typing out messages with only the verbal and gestural (and occasional tactile) cues of their ever-present, ever-hovering facilitators to guide them.

On that note, we should keep in mind something the Telepathy Tapes has shown all of us (except for those of us who prefer to believe in telepathy): facilitators can completely control messages without touching people or holding up the letterboards for them.

If Jaswal et al. had wanted to rule out facilitator control (or, for that matter, telepathy), they could have conducted a low-tech message-passing experiment before developing any of this fancy equipment and inflicting it on vulnerable individuals who may be prevented from giving genuine consent. As aversive as Jaswal et al. have claimed (without evidence) that message-passing tests are to non-speakers with autism, I’m guessing that these tests are far less aversive to them than wearing headsets are: especially headsets that project virtual letters and virtual lessons in front of them wherever they turn, and especially when they are essentially being forced to consent to these indignities through S2C.  Not to mention the fact that message-passing tests offer FC/RPM/S2Ced individuals one possibility than none of these other experiments offer: the possibility, should their “caregivers” accept the likely S2C-invalidating results of such tests, of being truly liberated from their facilitators—which is, after all, Jaswal et al.’s stated goal.

Finally, where is all this heading?  To quote again from the most recent of these studies, the HoloBoard study (Alabood, 2025):

§  “Head tracking could be exploited to ensure the virtual letterboard remains in the nonspeaker’s field of view even when they move.”

§  CRPs will continue to be present, “dedicat[ing] their focus to other aspects of supporting a user, such as promoting attention and regulation,” even when the HoloBoard user might wish to “engage in private conversations with a third person.” (They propose to explore ways that “would allow a CRP to support their nonspeaker while allowing the nonspeaker” during these private conversations.)

§  Or possibly CRPs would be replaced by a virtual CRP: “a personalized virtual CRP within the virtual environment. The virtual CRP would emulate the behaviour and appearance of a user’s human CRP to provide attentional and regulatory support.” But the virtual CRP may essentially replicate the sorts of message-controlling cues done by the real-world CRP: “Machine Learning (ML) techniques could be used to train the virtual CRP based on observations from a user’s real-world interactions with their human CRP.” While the authors don’t mention that the “virtual CRPSs” might learn to mimic the human CRPs’ prompts and board movements (part of how CRPs unwittingly control letter selections), in an article about this paper in IEEE Spectrum, a magazine published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Jaswal et al. write that “This virtual assistant [which now has a name: “ViC”]... can demonstrate motor movements as a user is learning to spell with the HoloBoard, and also offers verbal prompts and encouragement during a training session.”

§  Finally, in what are even more powerful venues for message control, “[l]arge Language Models (LLMs) could be integrated to reduce the effort needed to communicate thereby reducing user fatigue. For example, such a system would allow the user to produce elaborate responses by providing just a succinct prompt to an LLM.”

As I wrote earlier, many of us predicted these last two items would be next on Jaswal’s agenda. In other words:

§  Machine learning that allows S2C’s message-controlling prompts and cues to be taken over by machines and safely hidden away within their obscure, machine-learned, neural networks from FC critics and others concerned about the communication rights of autistic non-speakers

§  LLMs that elaborate the short messages authored by actual or virtual CRPs into messages that are even more filled with predictable blather and bromides, and even more removed from what minimal speakers actually want to communicate, than FC/RPM/S2C-generated output is.

The HoloBoard, the HoloLens, the HoloGaze, the LetterBox: all of it rings so... hollow. And it’s painful to think of how all the financial and intellectual capital that went into these projects might have been spent on to improve, rather than to diminish, the fragile lives of minimal speakers with autism.

REFERENCES

Alabood, L.,  Nazari, A., Dow, T., Alabood, S., Jaswal, V.K., Krishnamurthy, D. Grab-and-Release Spelling in XR: A Feasibility Study for Nonspeaking Autistic People Using Video-Passthrough Devices. DIS '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Pages 81 – 102 https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735719

Alabood, L., Dow, T., Feeley, K. B., Jaswal, V.K., Krishnamurthy, D. From Letterboards to Holograms: Advancing Assistive Technology for Nonspeaking Autistic Individuals with the HoloBoard. CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Article No.: 71, Pages 1 - 18 https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642626

Chen, Y., Siles, B., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2024). Receptive language and receptive-expressive discrepancy in minimally verbal autistic children and adolescents. Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 17(2), 381–394. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3079

Nazari, A., Krishnamurthy, D., Jaswal, V. K., Rathbun, M. K., & Alabood, L. (2024). Evaluating Gaze Interactions within AR for Nonspeaking Autistic Users. 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641825.3687743

Shahidi, A., Alabood, L., Kaufman, K. M., Jaswal, V. K., Krishnamurthy, D., & Wang, M. (2023). AR-based educational software for nonspeaking autistic people – A feasibility study. 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality

 

Can the HoloGaze liberate S2Ced individuals from their facilitators?

Over the past couple of years, S2C proponent Vikram Jaswal, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the father of an S2C user, and Diwakar Krishnamurthy, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Calgary and the father of an RPM user have co-authored several papers on the development of virtual tools that enable S2C users to virtually select virtual letters rather than pointing to letters on letterboards. Like Jaswal’s other recent papers, each of these begins with purported justifications for S2C as a valid communication method, and each reports instances of allegedly independent communication by S2C users. Like Jaswal’s other papers, therefore, these papers are worth reviewing in detail. In my last three posts, I discussed Alabood et al. (2024), a study involving a virtual letterboard, or HoloBoard, and Alabood et al. (2025), a study involving the use of virtual letter cubes to spell words.

In my next two posts, I’ll discuss two additional studies in Jaswal’s 2023-2025 virtual reality oeuvre that are relevant to us here at facilitatedcommunication.org: Nazari et al. (2024), a study involving the “HoloGaze,” and Shahidi et al. (2023), a study involving the “HoloLens.” What makes these studies relevant is that, like all the other Jaswal studies we’ve reviewed:

·       They involve language and literacy (some of Jaswal et al.’s other studies instead involve visual games)

·       They appear to show levels of language comprehension that are generally not found in minimally speaking autism, particularly in those with significant motor impairments (see Chen et al., 2024).

(Minimal speakers with autism and significant motor impairments being representative, per Jaswal et al., of the population that their studies are targeting.)

In this post, I’ll focus on the HoloGaze study (Nazari et al., 2024), a paper in which Krishnamurthy and Jaswal are listed, respectively, as the second and third authors. This paper focuses on a virtual reality technology, complete with headsets, that allows users to select letters and spell words by shifting their gaze to different letters from a virtual display. Users can select a particular letter either by sustaining their gaze on that letter, or by pushing a button while looking at it. The HoloGaze study differs from the HoloBoard and LetterBox studies in one important way: for the most part, it doesn’t to have its non-speaking autistic participants do anything other than select letters and spell words—as opposed to tasks that require actual comprehension of language. (It’s worth noting that a significant proportion of autistic individuals are hyperlexic and able to spell words that they don’t understand).

Like the other two papers, the HoloGaze paper opens with the same unsubstantiated/false claims about minimal speakers with autism, beginning with the purported attentional, sensory, and motor issues:

[N}onspeaking autistic people have significant attentional, sensory, and motor challenges.., making it difficult for them to write by hand or type inconventional ways. For example, many nonspeaking autistic people have difficulty with the fine motor control needed to use a pen or pencil.

As in the LetterBox paper, their authors’ sources for these claims are (1) and entire book attributed to someone who has been subjected to facilitated communication (Higashida, 2013), and (2) a meta-analysis of 41 studies on motor coordination in autism, none of which included the skills involved in pointing to letters on a letterboard (Fournier, 2010). To give Jaswal et al. the benefit of the doubt, when they mention typing in “conventional ways,” they may mean ten-finger typing. Ten-finger typing, as compared with typing with an index finger, does involve significant motor coordination. But, to the extent that the authors’ goal here is to motivate an examination of eye-gaze technology, they haven’t managed to explain why, for minimal speakers with autism, eye pointing would be superior to index-finger pointing.

Furthermore, the authors make no mention of the one specific motor issue, sometimes alleged in non-speaking autism (see Handley, 2022), that might be relevant here: ocular apraxia—or the ability to move one’s eyes in a desired direction. Ocular apraxia would have been relevant to their HoloGaze study because it reports involved a training phase in which non-speaking autistics learned how to select letters via eye gaze. If there’s no eye gaze impairment in autism, and if the non-speakers already know how to pick out letters on demand, then why do the participants in this study require anything more than a brief explanation in how to use the system?

Beyond their claims about attentional, sensory, and motor challenges in autism, the authors claim, once again citing the memoir attributed to Higashida (Higashida, 2013), that the tendency of non-speaking autistics to have trouble sitting still while being prompted by their facilitators to point to letters on the letterboard is the result of “regulatory” issues:

They may also be in constant motion (which seems to serve a regulatory function... making training to use a keyboard while remaining seated difficult [)].

Left out of this discussion is the more likely possibility: boredom with a task that, due to those significant comprehension problems in non-speaking autism that are particularly severe in those with significant motor impairments (see Chen et al., 2024), these individuals probably find meaningless.

Next, the authors claim that:

Some nonspeaking autistic people have learned to communicate by typing, which has allowed them to graduate from college and to write award-winning poetry.

Their sources are a National Public Radio piece about RPM user Elizabeth Bonker’s valedictory speech at her graduation from Rollins College (in which she stood at the podium while a pre-recorded speech, attributed to her, was broadcast), and an autobiographical piece attributed to David James Savarese, better known as Deej.

Despite the purported communicative successes of those who “communicate by typing,” the authors note that

the process by which they learned to type was lengthy and expensive, and often requires the ongoing support of another person.

The most likely explanation for these hurdles is that those subjected to “communication by typing,” aka Spelling to Communicate (S2C), depend on facilitator prompts and cues to determine which letters to select; for Jaswal et al., these hurdles are instead a reason to develop virtual reality technologies like the HoloGaze.

Importantly, however, the HoloGaze

allows a caregiver to join an AR session to train an autistic individual in gaze-based interactions as appropriate.

(“Caregiver” here is used in this paper to denote the facilitator, or what S2C-proponents call a “Communication and Regulations Partner.)

Those familiar with evidence-based AAC devices might wonder, given that there already exist AAC devices that allow eye-gaze selections or “eye typing,” what the point is of this new tool. But the authors, acknowledging that such technologies already exist, claim that VR tools offer “unique additional benefits.” They cite:

·       The “wider context” in which these devices can be used: “e.g., not just at a special education classroom but also for personal use cases.”

·        “mobility”

·       The “3-dimensional environment shared between educators and students,” which “can facilitate the training process for those who require extensive training.”

These strike me as pretty weak arguments. Standard AAC devices are mobile and can be used in a broad set of contexts. And why is “extensive training” necessary? Believing, as Jaswal does, that his non-speaking participants already know how to identify letters and point to them to spell words, and that non-speaking autistic individuals, like people in general, look at the letters that they point to (Jaswal, 2020), it’s unclear why these participants would need “extensive training” in using selecting virtual letters via the HoloGaze.

So who are these participants? In all the other studies we’ve reviewed so far, Jaswal et al.’s participants are explicitly described as individuals point to letters on letterboards with the support of communication partners (the hallmarks of Spelling to Communicate and Rapid Prompting Method). This study differs: its inclusion criteria do not mention communication partners; only “experience in communicating using a physical letterboard.” Participants therefore could have included those who communicate independently: without someone hovering, holding up the letterboard, prompting, or otherwise cueing them and controlling their letter selections. And yet the identities of every single person who is thanked in the paper’s acknowledgments suggest otherwise. In order of mention, they are: a neuropsychologist who believes in S2C and is doing her own experiments on S2C-ed individuals, an RPM user, the mother of an S2C user, an S2 practitioner, another S2C practitioner, and S2C promoter and practitioner Elizabeth Vosseller.

Let’s turn, now, to the actual experiment. After an initial “tolerance and calibration” phase, participants underwent a “training phase” in which they first learned to select flashing tiles and then flashing letters from arrays of tiles/letters in which only the target item flashed. If they selected the flashing item, it turned green and was surrounded by a “bounding box” that indicated “successful eye gaze engagement.” Also providing cues were the “caregivers”:

The person assisting the user could also observe the tile’s colour (because they were also wearing a device), enabling them to provide verbal prompts to guide the user’s attention if necessary. 

If the participants really had the language comprehension skills that Jaswal et al. regularly attribute to them, why couldn’t they just be told, verbally, how the system worked? All they needed to know, in order to use the system correctly, was this: “Direct your eyes to the flashing letter. Then either look at it for one second, or push this button while you look at it.” One has to wonder whether, at some level of consciousness or sub-consciousness, Jaswal suspected that his participants didn’t have the kinds of comprehension skills that he has long attributed to the broader non-speaking population to which they belong.

The flashing letters and the facilitators’ “attentional prompts and cues” continued into the “Assisted Spelling” part of the testing phase, where the participants had to spell actual words by selecting letters from a virtual letterboard. The researchers dictated six three-letter words (JET, DRY, EVE, FAN, GUM, RUG, IVY), and the target letters flashed one by one in order as they were selected. Besides the flashing, prompting, and facilitator cueing, participants received one additional cue:

To increase their visual load gradually, participants did not see the full letterboard at the beginning of the testing phase. Instead, only the letters in the first word were presented. After the first word (and after all subsequent words), the additional letters required to spell the next word were added.

To justify this, the authors cite feedback that was almost certainly generated by S2C:

This design was suggested by our nonspeaking autistic consultant to reduce visual clutter initially as the participant learned the affordances of a new interface.

This feedback was almost certainly generated by the facilitators/CRPs rather than by the non-speakers themselves.

Following the “Assisted Spelling Phase” was the “Unassisted Spelling Phase.” This involved six four-letter words (ARCH, BALL, DUCK, EARL, FALL, GIFT, HOPE), without the target letter flashing. It’s unclear whether the facilitators were still allowed to prompt and cue, but in any case it’s a lot harder to detect and cue people’s eye gaze than their extended index fingers.

Curiously, there was a fair amount of attrition at each stage, from the “tolerance and calibration” phase to the “training” phases to the “testing” phases:

Twelve of the 13 participants who tolerated the device attempted the testing phases that involved spelling... Half of those who tried the testing phases (6 of 12) completed both the phase where the letters flashed in sequence ("assisted") and the phase where the letters did not flash in sequence ("unassisted").

In other words, less than half the participants made it through the whole study—short though it was. And yet, the authors professed to be impressed:

This is a remarkable number given this was their first experience using eye gaze interactions using a head-mounted AR device.

As for the actual results of those who completed at least one of the testing phases, the author report two factors: correct interactions per minute (which presumably means “correct letter selections per minute”) and error rate. Mean interactions per minute decreased over time from 13.49 to 10.53, which the author claim reflects increased complexity (more letters to choose from; the shift from assisted to unassisted spelling; the shift from three-letter words to four-letter words). Thus, the unassisted spelling averaged between 5 and 6 seconds per correct letter—a surprisingly low rate for anyone who actually knows how to spell the given words.

Meanwhile, the error rate, “surprisingly” according to the authors,” improved from 0.42 (range: 0.07 - 0.79) to 0.39 (range: 0.08 - 0.63).” In other words, participants only selected the correct letters, on average, about 3/5 of the time, ranging (across the 6 participants) from near-complete success to an improvement, at the lowest end, from selecting the correct letter only about 1/5 times to selecting it just under 1/3 of the time.

While the official training only involved spelling three and four-letter words, some participants, “if they had time and interest,” were asked to engage in one activity that actually required comprehension: “answer[ing] five questions with one word answers on the virtual board.” However, the authors tell us:

This data is not reported here because these tasks were completed by only a subset of participants and because of space limitations.

We can only wonder what the excluded data would have suggested to their readers about language and literacy skills in non-speaking autism.

REFERENCES

Alabood, L.,  Nazari, A., Dow, T., Alabood, S., Jaswal, V.K., Krishnamurthy, D. Grab-and-Release Spelling in XR: A Feasibility Study for Nonspeaking Autistic People Using Video-Passthrough Devices. DIS '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Pages 81 – 102 https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735719

Alabood, L., Dow, T., Feeley, K. B., Jaswal, V.K., Krishnamurthy, D. From Letterboards to Holograms: Advancing Assistive Technology for Nonspeaking Autistic Individuals with the HoloBoard. CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Article No.: 71, Pages 1 - 18 https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642626

Chen, Y., Siles, B., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2024). Receptive language and receptive-expressive discrepancy in minimally verbal autistic children and adolescents. Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 17(2), 381–394. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3079

Fournier, K. A., Hass, C. J., Naik, S. K., Lodha, N., & Cauraugh, J. H. (2010). Motor coordination in autism spectrum disorders: a synthesis and meta-analysis. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 40(10), 1227–1240. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-0981-3

Handley, J. B., & Handley, J. (2021). Underestimated: An autism miracle. Skyhorse

Higashida, N. (2013). The reason I jump: The inner voice of a thirteen-year-old boy with autism. Knopf Canada.

Jaswal, V. K., Wayne, A., & Golino, H. (2020). Eye-tracking reveals agency in assisted autistic communication. Scientific reports, 10(1), 7882. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64553-9

Nazari, A., Krishnamurthy, D., Jaswal, V. K., Rathbun, M. K., & Alabood, L. (2024). Evaluating Gaze Interactions within AR for Nonspeaking Autistic Users. 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641825.3687743

Shahidi, A., Alabood, L., Kaufman, K. M., Jaswal, V. K., Krishnamurthy, D., & Wang, M. (2023). AR-based educational software for nonspeaking autistic people – A feasibility study. 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality