LA Teen With Autism, Communicates Through Typing

I ran across this article online and really wanted to share it with you.  I hope you find it as inspiring as I did.

LOS ANGELES -- For the first seven years of Jacob Artson's life, his family believed the doctors who labeled their nonverbal son with autism as "mentally retarded."

And yet, just before Jacob's seventh birthday, a miracle happened. Jacob's social skills therapist told the family about facilitated communication, a method by which a facilitator attempts to teach individuals with a disability to organize and control their body and attention in order to communicate by typing.

Jacob's mother, Elana Artson, told The Huffington Post in an email that when she first heard about the method, she "didn't expect anything to come of it. Jacob couldn't read, so how was he going to type? But I figured that I would be able to say that we had tried before crossing it off our list of possible therapies."

So Elana took Jacob to see Darlene Hanson, a speech therapist who is now the director of communication services at Whittier Area Parents' Association for the Developmentally Handicapped (WAPADH) in Whittier, Calif. Elana described in an email what happened in the first hour Jacob was with Hanson:

"Darlene wrote eight words on a board -- shoe, bus, house, etc. -- and asked Jacob, 'Which one do you ride to school?, Which one do you wear on your foot?, Which one do you live in?' Each time, with her providing support, he pointed to the correct answer," Elana wrote. "She gave him a break, and he went to look at some model trains in the corner of the room (like many kids with autism, Jacob was fascinated by trains).

"Then Darlene took out a portable keyboard. She said one of those trains had 'Santa Fe' written on it. 'Can you type Santa Fe?,' she asked. Jacob typed 'Sants 4e.' I started to get excited -- if she was moving his hand, she wouldn't have let him overshoot the correct letters, right? Next question: 'What is the car on the back of the train called?' Jacob began to type h-e- (okay, deflate -- This wasn't real, I'm thinking to myself) -l-p-m-e. Then she asked him a series of questions and asked him to type Y for yes and N for no. 'Did you type Help me?' - Y. 'Do you need help spelling?' - N. 'Do you need help typing?' - Y. 'Is holding your hand helping?' - Y.

"What happened during that hour changed Jacob's life (and ours) more dramatically than I ever dreamed possible," Elana added.

To read more of this article, click here.