3AM Regrets

I wanted to share a couple Android apps I've found to be helpful on days that I'm overwhelmed (nonverbal). Regardless of how thoroughly an autistic person learns to speak, there will be days where it really costs too many spoons to make words come out with proper enunciation, especially in order. So, apps like these are essential for austistic adults, if only because many people are too lazy to communicate with sincerity.

There are many such apps, but these two are free and highly configurable. Kids may prefer apps that use more/larger pictures, but once they develop a larger "inner vocabulary" the picture boards won't be suitable. I remember clearly when I was a kid, because I couldn't say the words I was reading, my mother assumed I didn't know them, that somehow I was fooling all my teachers into thinking i was more intelligent than i actually was because I was somehow cheating on the book reports I was turning in. She constantly made me feel as if everything I didn't say verbally didn't matter. (spoiler, I was not cheating... and later i realized that for her, it was "anything i did that didn't match her ideals" that didn't matter.... but that's another story for another time.) 

This is what I mean when I say "I wish she had done something" - that is, I wish she had listened to the words I said without mouth-speaking. Written and spoken vocabulary do not match. I wish I had had the freedom to use written communication, or apps like these, as a child, or at least that my "peripheral communication" had been celebrated as much as being able to talk is. My choices and voice counts, my intelligence cannot be denied, even when i don't speak! i will insist on this because I have no one else to do it for me.

So the first app pictured is called "I Can Communicate". I prefer this app because it has bright colors and I can use images and emotes to decorate the buttons.

The second app pictured is called "Speech Assistant". It is more popular among the wider community. The free version is as pictured, but if you pay a small amount you can change the theme and do some other adjustments that I'm unfamiliar with.

Both apps use the smartphones' TTS engine to read the designated text out loud, and as you can see you can program simple words and parts of sentences to create conversations on the fly, or whole paragraphs if you know you're going to run into someone who needs telling off.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is because I don't think it's necessary to applaud mouth-words. People communicate without mouth-words all the time. They nod, they scowl, they groan, they roll their eyes, and sometimes they give you hugs unexpectedly. These behaviors are communications far more sincere than any mouth-word could ever be. Tools like these are far more for the benefit of people who lack peripheral communication; they're still kind of annoying to use for people who find it unnecessary and troublesome to speak. 

Sign language is probably a better option, as it's a whole language rather than a work-around, but it requires that all participants learn to use it. Still, it's far more flexible for an at-home environment than even the most thorough of image boards/TTS apps, and far more comfortable and natural than mouth-words.

All of these words and more choked me up today when we were in voice chat [playing Mario Kart with a Twitch streamer's community], and often I could not react to the conversation in time, I could not fully express myself, i felt often like I was "missing the beat" of the conversation. I am "highly verbal", and so I can say something - but I have "insufficient speech" at my highest energy levels - I can never say everything I wish to, and I can't say anything in the way that makes full sense to allistics. This is the proof of my brain structure, my autism. Even at the height of stimulation, hyperactivity, I cannot fully compensate for the reliance on mouth-words that I find most limiting in modern society.