Communication First

Our Director of Policy & Legal Advocacy Sam Crane spoke at Healthier Together! Sam, Henry Claypool (Brandeis’s Community Living Policy Center) & Michelle Meade (Univ. of MI Center for Disability Health & Wellness) discussed health care best practices for people with disabilities.

[Image 1: Sam Crane, Michelle A. Meade & discussion moderator Andrew Jager sit on a stage below a screen that says, “American Hospital Association Healthier Together Conference. Stronger Communities. Better Health Outcomes. May 12 - 14, 2026. Dallas.” An audience sits in front of them, & a sign language interpreter stands to the side of the stage.

Image 2: A slide with a collage of words with small icons representing some of them: “Improving Care Experience For People With Disabilities. Healthier Together Conference welcomes Sam Crane, Michelle A. Meade, & Henry Claypool, with Andrew Jager.” The word collage promotes understanding how to support people with disabilities through supported decision making & centering patients’ needs & experiences.]

“For the first 18 years of Zimmerman’s life, professionals assumed she was too intellectually disabled to meaningfully communicate. Access to augmentative and alternative communication, or AAC, opened the world to her. Now, she pushes to get people like her access to different forms of communication so they can speak for themselves too.”

Revolutionary — The 19th As the country marks 250 years, The 19th is centering the women and LGBTQ+ people whose lives and work have challenged this nation to make good on promises it has yet to extend to all.

“Every message already takes attention, motor planning, & time,” says Hari Srinivasan, Neuroscience Ph.D. candidate & AAC user. “When technology adds corrections & guesswork, it compounds that effort.” He explains how engineered exclusion harms AAC users: https://lnk.to/desdig.

[Image: Wearing a dark cap and light brown jacket, Hari Srinivasan stands inside stone castle ruins along the coast of Northern Ireland.]

“Within five minutes of meeting, we were having a conversation. It wasn’t about the state of world politics — as Bex says, she’d like to have more complex discussions but she restricts herself because of the time and effort involved — but we chatted a bit. ‘Trying to get people to learn the system has been a six-year battle,’ she says. ‘People don’t necessarily sympathise because they have absolutely no idea what it feels like to want to say something but you can’t.’”

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthcare/article/life-with-locked-in-syndrome-despite-eveything-you-are-alive-ggnpmsdjt?shem=rimspwouoe,

Life with locked-in syndrome: ‘Despite everything, you are alive’ Matt Rudd has remarkable conversations with three Britons who, after life-changing accidents, have fully active minds but cannot move or speak, and can communicate only via the blink of an eye

Father’s Day will be here sooner than you think. Be ready to show the father figures in your life some love. Get them (and the whole family!) CommunicationFIRST gear to help us win the fight for communication rights and access: lnkfi.re/c1shp.

[Image 1: A grandfather wearing a CommunicationFIRST shirt bends down on one knee and holds his granddaughter who is a toddler with a CommunicationFIRST button in her hand. The two of them are in a yard with lush trees.

Image 2: A young AAC user sits with his AAC device mounted in front of him, and he happily waves. His smiling dad squats down beside him. The pair wear CommunicationFIRST shirts and pose in front of windows letting in natural light.]

Want to learn more about advocacy by & for people with speech-related disabilities? Subscribe to our newsletter! A few times each month, get updates on calls to action, programming, & the latest from our colleagues. lnkfi.re/nc1st

📸: photo from DJ Reinhardt

[Image: A person sits in a powerchair with an AAC device in front of them, looking up at a teenager who looks back at them.

Welcome our new Board Treasurer,Shubha Balabaer! They are a disability advocate, social & racial justice activist, & parent to a nonspeaker. They help other parents connect to a broader disability justice movement & ways of disability-centered parenting. https://lnk.to/shubha

[Image: Shubha Balabaer wears big, fashionable sunglasses and a Disability Culture Lab T-shirt that says, “cure ableism” five times, each in a different color to make a rainbow.]