I’m Autistic. One of the things that has changed for me when I switched universities is that now I attend most of my classes in person instead of online. This change has materialized in many ways, but one of the most interesting to me has been the impact on discussions that I have with my peers.
My previous program was online. All of my discussions with the professor and my classmates happened in online mediums like live chats and discussion forums. I still have some of that interaction style at my new school, but with the in-person aspect of these classes, I now regularly engage in face-to-face communication with professors and peers. This presents some challenges, because I am non-speaking.
The university has given me a blanket accommodation to use augmentative and alternative communication. For me, this usually manifests in typing, either on my computer or on my phone. For prerecorded presentations, I may choose to use a voice generation program to produce the narration, but I find that waiting for the audio to be generated during a conversation is an impediment to flow. When I need to interact with a professor, ask a question during a lecture, or engage in a small group discussion during a class period, I tend to write.
This has resulted in some unusual interactions. One professor has suggested I raise my hand when I have something to contribute during class, and they will rush over and read the contents of my screen for everyone else to hear. Another has me send a chat message to the TA during class for them to read out loud. Sometimes the professors will make slides or lecture notes available prior to class, which allows me to prepare questions or comments ahead of time to be brought up when they occur. Other times, I may have to raise my hand and have the whole class wait on me while I type, because I didn’t have the opportunity to prepare.
During small group discussions, I try to position myself to one side of my group, and I face half-away from them and twist my writes to an awkward angle so they can see my laptop screen as I type. Because I’m not always making eye contact with the person I’m replying to, my messages sometimes feel like they became addressed to the group as a whole. It can be difficult to type quickly enough, even when there’s no lag because the others can see as I’m typing. One interesting effect I’ve found is that leaving what I’ve written up on my screen as the conversation continues keeps my words an active part of the conversation in a way that spoken words are not. When I noticed this effect, I began trying to phrase my thoughts as questions, and the subsequent conversation among my group mates tended to stay focused on that question for as long as it remained on screen. I attribute this partially to the words remaining in their line of sight, but also the parallel with the authoritative nature of discussion questions being posted in the professor’s slides.
These differences in interaction call attention to my different communication modality. Everyone in my classes knows that I’m the student who doesn’t speak. Most of them do their best to accommodate those differences, which I appreciate. I wouldn’t say that I feel excluded. But no matter how they try to adjust their behavior and circumstances, the differences still exist. My goal for a long time was to minimize how noticeable my differences were, but now I’m trying to identify the affordances created by the way I participate, to see if I can contribute in unique ways. There may be some drawbacks to typing compared to writing, but there are advantages too.
Part of being a member of a diverse student body is to experience and learn from that diversity. I want to be the best communicator I can be, and I want my fellow students to have the opportunity to practice interacting with non-speaking colleagues. This is an area where we can all benefit if we stop trying to make everyone the same without losing sight of the goals of accessibility and equity.