Introduction to CHAT

Imagine you are bursting with thoughts, emotions, opinions and every other kind of idea that most people communicate via their voices, but you can’t. That describes the first ten years of Graham Tresness’s life. He is a typical pre-teen, only he can’t talk because his cerebral palsy limits his muscle control. The Tresnesses spent 10 years trying to find a way for their son to communicate. He now has a device made by Tobii that allows him to use his eyes to write messages and then speaks for him. After the Tresnesses found a way for their son to communicate, they wanted to share their knowledge and experience with as many people as possible. The Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) has partnered with Barb Tresness, Graham’s mother, and Beth Tollar, a trained speech and language pathologist who specializes in augmentative communication, to develop an awesome new program called Communication Hope through Assistive Technology (CHAT). Encompassing a variety of activities, CHAT's main goal is to help children and young adults who use Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) to communicate better and help their community see AAC as an accepted way of communicating. For more information about AAC, see Augmentative and Alternative Communication, a blog post by Kate Battoe. CHAT is all about the kids, as BBI's chairman Peter Blanck always says, but it's also about everyone who works on it and everyone affected by it - from the CHAT camp leaders and councilors, to the presenters for the parents, to the people working behind the scenes, to the community at large. This is what this blog will be about. You'll get stories about the community CHAT creates from three points of view. Deborah Cavanagh is a freelance writer and the mother of a young woman with Down syndrome. She will write stories from a parent's perspective. Beth’s daughter Emily, age 10, has been involved with CHAT club from the beginning and is excited to be writing from the kids' point of view. As a young adult with a speech impairment, Kate Battoe will write from the prospective of an AAC user. We hope to give you a well-rounded view of what is going on in the CHAT community.