Help yourself or your relations with disability communicate better!

It is well known that people with disability commonly have speech and language deficiency. These people include those with autism and cerebral palsy who have minimum or no verbal skills. If you are living with a disability or have a friend or relation living with a disability, knowing how to improve communication can be a very useful avenue to enable an individual live a fulfilling life.

Since people with disability face communication barriers, they can enhance their communication using alternatives including the use of gestures, pictures, boards and objects. Such an approach is referred to as augmentative and alternative communication. These alternatives enable individuals with disability express their thoughts, feelings and desires.

Individuals with disability can exploit these alternatives to make life better and more enjoyable. When an individual with disability communicates better, it reduces the stress associated with care-giving in the absence of professionals. This can go a long way to enable families and friends spend quality time with their relations as well easily understand when professionals or others in society abuse or attempt to abuse them.

Individuals with disability should learn to use appropriate gestures, pictures, boards and objects that convey particular meaning. Individuals with disabilities should use and their relations should note objects that they use to mean persons, places, activities and things.

Some examples of how these work inculdes the use of pictures. The individual can use the picture of CD player when angry to show the source of his or her anger or relations can show pictures of a cell phone and CD player when trying to identify the source of anger of a relation.

Individuals can also point to the picture of a van or bus when they are scared of it or relations can show them both pictures to know what makes them scared. Relations can also show pictures representing various persons (mom, dad, staff) in order to know why an individual is sad or the individual can simply grab a picture of that person and show to family and friends in order to report an incident.

It is very important for individuals with disability and their relations to get familiar with alternative communication because it is very important to label and describe feelings accurately. Relations should get used to the body language of individuals with disability especially their facial expressions and attach the right meaning for various expressions. This can be done by showing the individual pictures with various facial expressions at different times and seek to attribute them to each situation ( for example, happy, sad, disappointed, angry, afraid, shy, etc). These can go a long way to make life easier and relief what otherwise may consitute a huge burden on individuals and their relations.