Say what?

Maggie’s communication device is an amazing thing. It is a dynavox DV4 and has capability for unlimited speech. Maggie’s abilities fall far shorter than the dynavox, but it gives her unlimited opportunity to expand her communication. The picture shows a page of forty choices, many of which lead to other pages with 40 choices. Soon Maggie will graduate to a page with 60 choices.

Maggie and all her classmates use communication devices. They “talk” to each other all day and that is the best practice. Maggie can ask for meals, tell us when she needs changing, call mom, dad her brothers, her teachers and all of her nurses by name. Every week she shows some new level of understanding and it is quite amazing. She also loves to tell jokes using the device. She starts laughing before the questions are out and slams the button to get the answer out there as quickly as possible.

The “voice” on the Dynavox is a flat computer voice. It speaks exactly what is written. Stray punctuation or typos are spoken. It definitely makes you cock your head when you hear the word “comma” spoken mid sentence. Also spelling or uncommon words or names must be phonetic. Maggie has classmates named Grimaldy, Cui-ping and Tyre. These are not recognized by the dynavox and I have to spell those Grimaawldee, chow peng, and Tie ray for correct pronunciation.

Every school day Maggie shares her “news” from home and brings back news from her school day. This, of course, requires programming time. It is not difficult at all (though I am still the only one in the house who knows how to do it), but it takes about 10-15 minutes. I need some of that time to come up with something clever. Midweek news is the hardest because there is generally nothing to report. I never let the facts, or lack thereof, get in the way of a story, though, so I can generally come up with something. News on Monday and Friday is easy because we can talk about the past or upcoming weekend.

This morning Maggie’s news was about the super bowl. She is informing her classmates that we are rooting for the New Orleans Saints (all due respect to Colts fans, but it is just time). You really have not lived until you hear a computerized voice with zero inflection say:

WHO DAT!