Hand Someone a Board

A board says nothing on its own. The tap is only half the message — the other half is what the person holding the moment does with the answer. AAC AAC. Augmentative and alternative communication: any way of communicating that supplements or replaces speech — boards, pictures, text, devices. For people whose speech is unreliable sometimes or always. practice has a name for that half: the coaching that teaches a board's use is part of the practice, not an extra. The moves below are that coaching, written as steps. They take no training and cost nothing, and the hardest one is the first: the answer you get is the answer that counts.

What you need

• A board the person can reach — a full talking board, a choice path, or two giant buttons. The smallest board is a real board.
• Ordinary days. Boards are learned on calm ones, not tested on hard ones.
• Nothing to buy or sign up for. Every board named here runs in a browser and stays on your device.

Steps

1. Keep the board where the person lives. A board in a drawer is no board at all — the device sits where the person sits.
2. Offer it on ordinary days. Snack, walk, which shirt — a board used daily is there the day it matters.
3. Model, don't quiz. Tap tiles yourself in real moments so the person sees the board work — and never ask a question you already know the answer to.
4. Hold the device steady, then let go. Offer the screen within reach and keep your hands off it — hovering says the answer still needs your approval.
5. Wait without prompting. Silence after the offer is thinking time, not refusal. Asking again can cost the person the answer they were still assembling.
6. Accept the first answer. An inconvenient no that gets overridden teaches that neither answer means anything.
7. Offer only choices you will honor. A choice that can be vetoed after the tap is a lesson in futility — the board's whole value is that taps are real.

If it goes wrong

Sometimes the board comes back unanswered, or gets pushed away, or the answer arrives and the hard moment is still hard. None of that is failure — a refused offer is still an offer, and the next one costs nothing. The real failure modes are the quiz and the veto: testing what you already know, asking twice to check the tap was real, honoring only the convenient answers. Those teach a board to be a test, and people stop answering tests. Nothing here is speech therapy — for that, a speech-language professional is the right path — and no board named here watches, scores, or leaves the device.

Where to go next

• My Board — the full tap-to-speak board — needs, core words, and your own photos.
• My Choices — a first-then path of two to four choices, spoken as they are tapped.
• Yes & No — two giant buttons for the hardest moments — the page these partner moves came from.
• Beside the Meltdown — the essay for the adult in the room, for the moments bigger than any board.

What this rests on: Augmentative and alternative communication — 44 studies, which includes speech-generating boards and the coaching that teaches their use. Same family line as the boards below.