Paper, a backup for when the screen is missing
A digital communication tool has limits of its own: a battery that falls to zero, a place where the device has no business being, a moment when time is short. A printed board suffers none of these failures.
A digital communication tool is of great service: a wide vocabulary, a voice that says aloud what the person builds, a board that can be changed in a few movements. But it shares the fragility of any electronic device. A battery that falls to zero, a screen that freezes, a place where the device itself is not allowed: all of them moments when the screen no longer answers. A printed board suffers none of these failures. That is what makes it, more than a mere substitute, a backup in its own right.
When the battery goes
A communication device is still a device: its battery runs down, its system can freeze, an update can fail at the worst moment. A study that is already old but still cited in the field of assistive technology, published in 1993, put at 29.3% the proportion of assistive devices completely abandoned by their users, poor device performance being among the causes identified, alongside a lack of training or the failure to consult the person when the tool was chosen.
A failure never gives warning. It happens at the moment when speaking is most needed, never at a moment chosen in advance. A backup tool that depends on no electronics keeps that moment from turning into complete silence for want of an alternative available there and then.
When the device is not allowed
Some care settings rule out electronic devices altogether. Before an MRI scan, the French health insurance service asks for any object containing metal, mobile phone included, to be left outside the examination room, because the strength of the magnetic field can damage or move such objects. That magnetic field stays active at all times, as OHSU, an American university hospital, points out, which is why access to certain imaging areas is strictly controlled and reserved for compatible equipment.
In such an area, a tablet or a phone simply has no place, however important what the person needs to say at that precise moment. A sheet of paper, on the other hand, goes everywhere: no magnetic field damages it, no rule excludes it from a waiting room, an emergency cubicle or a hospital room.
In an emergency, time is short
An emergency leaves no time to look for a charger, to wait for an application to start, or to recall a forgotten passcode. A printed board is read at a glance, by the person themselves or by whoever is beside them, without ever having handled the tool before. This simplicity is no secondary detail: it decides whether the tool actually serves at the precise moment when it should, and not a few minutes later.
A redundancy recommended by professionals
Professional AAC resources do not present a digital tool as sufficient on its own. ASHA, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, points out that people who use AAC most often combine several tools according to the situation, rather than keeping to a single one. A specialist AAC resource explicitly recommends preparing a paper copy of the usual vocabulary, in the form of printed and laminated boards, for the moments when the device does not work properly, whether because of a fault, of light that is too bright, or of a particular environment such as a swimming pool.
- No battery to recharge, no start-up time.
- Survives a fall and dust, where a screen cracks: slipped into a laminated wallet, a paper board also stands up to splashes.
- Is understood with no training at all, including by a person meeting the tool in an emergency.
- Remains allowed where an electronic device is not, such as in certain hospital departments.
- Depends on no update, no account and no connection.
This redundancy also matters at the scale of an institution. A school, a social care establishment or a hospital ward takes in different people, each with their own device, their own settings, sometimes their own interface language. A printed board displayed in a shared space, by contrast, is understood by anyone who looks at it, whether or not that person knows the usual digital tool of the person being helped. This shared legibility counts as much as an individual backup.
A backup that itself depends on a battery is not quite a backup.
One simple step extends the life of this backup: keep the printed board in a laminated wallet or a plain clear wallet, in a fixed place known to those around, rather than in a drawer among other papers.
A printed board is therefore not a degraded version of the digital tool, nor a stage left behind as soon as a screen exists: it is the part of the tool that goes on working when everything else stops. Thinking about the paper backup from the first day, rather than on the day the screen really is missing, avoids discovering that fragility at the worst moment. Words Within Reach offers exactly this printable board alongside the screen, free like the rest of the service, made for the day when no screen is available.
Sources
- Comment se déroule une IRM ?, Assurance Maladie.
- MRI Safety, Oregon Health & Science University.
- Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA).
- Planning for communication when AAC is not available, AssistiveWare.
- Predictors of assistive technology abandonment, Phillips, Zhao, Assistive Technology, 1993.
This article is published under the CC BY 4.0 licence: copy it, translate it, republish it, crediting ODERSA.