Episode 194: India Ochs: Lawyer, Social Justice Advocate, Mother, and AAC User

This week, Chris interviews the incredible India Ochs! India is a brilliant social justice advocate, lawyer, educator, and board member for USSAAC and ISSAC who is also a lifelong AAC user. India describes her incredible journey with AAC, how she has used her many skills to advocate for social justice, why she volunteers so much of her time to the disabled community, and what she sees are the impacts of systemic racism on the field AAC (e.g. lack of vocabulary words to talk about racism).

Before the interview, Chris and Rachel respond to several comments from listeners about their recent banter about PECS. Some listeners said PECS works for them while robust AAC  doesn’t work for them. Chris and Rachel note that, if robust AAC hasn’t worked, maybe the implementation hasn’t been done in a systematic way. They also respond to the idea that PECS is a necessary stepping stone to robust AAC, and provide some strategies for demonstrating early success with robust AAC when it doesn’t look like AAC is “working” yet.

Key ideas this week:

🔑 While the systematic nature of PECS implementation can encourage some people who would like a step-by-step guide, in some cases it causes students to “stall out” at a particular stage because they are required to demonstrate certain skills before moving on the next skill.

🔑 A simple paper and pen can be the most effective form of AAC for some literate AAC users. 

🔑 It is difficult to find symbols for words like racism, anti-racism, African-American, Black person, hispanic, Martin Luther King, Jr on many AAC devices. Developers need to bring in experts on Black history and anti-racism to tell us what vocabulary we need to add to our devices.

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Links from the episode:

AAC Speaker Connection: https://speaker.ussaac.org/

Silent Auction benefiting USSAAC that ends October 15th:

https://www.silentauctionpro.com/bidonlinegrid.php?groupId=1860

or email Virtualauction@ussaac.org

India's Blog: https://intrepidoaks.com/

Xceptional AAC Leaders Book with Chapter by India