if anything,equipment shoud be cheaper because those that make use of aids/equipment,ie disabled people with high needs- have very little left to spend from their disability benefits due to it paying for their their care,and then there are those of us who are stupidly refused most benefits due to being in residential care-and any we do have goes towards paying for our placement and petrol for our motability car if we have one.
it is absolutley disgusting that this government feels it is ok to fund equipment for people with physical or sensory disabilities-such as wheel chairs,hearing aids and crutches for example,because people with physical or hearing difficulty or physical needs need those aids to have quality of life,however the government does not fund ear defenders,sound proofing or AAC communicative aids which not having profoundly affects many of us with autism-these have a big impact on our lives and everyone around us,not just quality of life-they improve and affect so much.
the government shoud get hold of the papers they have the disability discrimination act written on and shove it up their arses because they pick and choose what they want to avoid discrimination against and that is not a discrimination act,its a biased piece of crap.
thanks to our speech therapist [am guessing are reading this because everyone from ours seems to get hold of the bloody thing] we had recently [ie,this week] become a temperary home to a liberator AAC device- it was more for one of our lads who is unable to communicate useable verbal language at all.
anyone who knows self online or offline will probably know had personaly tried to get one [the possum jive] via the local government a few years ago-this was a reasonable priced device but had found out our stingy council does not fund AAC devices,and now possum have stopped making AAC equipment due to all this funding loss.
am not fully non verbal but am partly non verbal,and woud be greatly helped with a pocket AAC device-being partly non verbal was not the reason for being refused the funding,they woud refuse someone who had no useable verbal language,perhaps thats their way at saying they are not being discriminative.
anyway,those of us interested have all had a go of it-the device is huge and heavier than a full sized laptop but it boots quickly when compared to a laptop,am not sure what battery life is like,the adapter for charging that device is huge though.
had taken a photo of it one night whilst sat in the lounge,trying to keep staff busy so they forgot time and didnt send em to bed early,though have had to brighten it up in GIMP because its really dark in lounge.
its fucking awesome.
if everyone was rich woud tell everyone who has autism or has a child with autism to buy one of these as it encourages the user to use more language if they have the ability,if not they will only recognise the pictures-but its a great bit of kit,just a pity we arent all rich.
it has PECS pictures to trigger the machine to speak or can type words out to trigger the speech [AKA text to speech].
the guy that is hopefuly getting it took to it straight away,can tell it will help him so much.
unfortunately though,was toldd the machine costs far to much-to be exact they said the price of a car and our guy is going to have to have a organisation do fund raising for him [providing he is approved by this org as they probably get alot of requests] and it coud take a year or whatever for him to get the device.
-had looked into us doing fundraising for him but was told because we are under a company and not a charity status organisation,we are not aloud to fundraise which is shit.
had said what about Proloquo2go and an iphone or ipad-that is the AAC software for the iphone and ipad that had often posted on here about being close to buying prior to release,but it was found out [not by self,speech therapist did all the work-she knew about the software already] that the developers dont give free trials for people to have a go and see if it suits their needs.
its aimed at people with autism/LD and they shoud realise that we are not frigging clones who will be able to do or not do,or like/not like the same things.
next week,we has a lady from dynavox coming with another AAC,was really hoping to get a go of it as am a big fan of dynavox but had forgotten at the time she is coming am going to be at mums/dads, speech therapist said she will take pictures of it in use [if reading this,please do,woud love to see it in use].
