Okay, he’s not autistic, but he’s very visibly disabled and uses AAC. This is a man who has to work so hard to type words and composing sentences can take him a long time since he flinches a cheek muscle which is is picked up by the sensor mounted on his glasses.
He’s a man who probably has a whole bunch of things he wants to say and rarely gets the chance to. So what happens?
Somebody will say something to Stephen or ask him a question, and then they’ll wander off while he’s composing a reply. People are afraid to approach him and talk to him because they don’t know what to do in the interim while he’s typing.
Stephen Hawking can’t do “small talk” because of the effort he has to put forth to communicate via his computer. Talking to him requires patience and a lot of waiting. For interviews, the interviewers send him the questions beforehand to let him compose responses so he can fire them off faster than if he talked “live”.
People don’t know how long it takes Stephen to respond because it’s rare to see a real-time conversation. It may take him almost fifteen minutes to say something as simple as “Hello, thank you for stopping by.”
He notices when people speak to him and then drift off while he’s trying to answer. It frustrates the hell out of him!
Sometimes, I really want to slap every person who did that to Stephen because it probably uses a lot of his spoons to type and they cause him to waste that effort. It’s a total disrespect for his communication method. The most annoying aspect of such blatant disrespect is people don’t even realize they’re doing it.
I always say that if I ever got lucky enough to sit next to Stephen at a dinner party or something and somebody tried to engage me while I was waiting for him, I would put my hand up and say “Sorry, I’m talking to him right now” and treat it like somebody interrupting/talking over somebody who was using their mouth to speak.
I wonder how often the whole “ask a question and then wander off” scenario happens to nonverbal / nonspeaking autistic people like Amy Sequenzia or @lysikan.
For future reference, what is the best thing to do while waiting for someone to finish composing a message?
My best guess is sit quietly and don’t stare at the person too much. 😛 But I don’t use AAC myself, however I would be unnerved if somebody was staring at me while I typed.
If I was with Stephen, I might move over to sit beside him and watch his screen unless he indicates he doesn’t want me to do that. I would turn to look at him to talk and then look at his screen to let him work on responding. It might even save him some effort because he won’t have to hit whatever button makes it talk.
I sometimes use AAC and I feel like this is pretty appropriate. Another thing that happens when I use AAC is if I’m not too nervous I’ll make facial expressions or grunt to show my intention. So like if I accidentally hit “I want” “to eat” when I mean “to drink” I’ll grunt and wave my hand indicating that wasn’t what I meant. I’ll assume I have more ability to do so than someone with more limited mobility. Generally in my personal experience, I don’t mind if people try to follow along with my sentences and piece together what I’m trying to say, but I think it would be rude if they tried to finish my sentence for me.
^ Cool! I would do my best to be patient because speech is difficult for me. I can do it and nobody sees the work I do because all they see is me speaking words as the end result. Sometimes words I wasn’t intending to say come out and I have to backtrack. I’m so much clearer in writing than I am with speech.
So while I don’t have too much of a time gap between hearing and responding, I can understand the frustration of somebody who takes awhile to answer only to have the person they’re talking to walk off on them.
So if that situation ever arose where I HAD to leave, I would be really apologetic.
Just wait. You can watch my fingers on my keyboard (I use a tablet/notebook hybrid for speech-to-text/text-to-speech) if you want but please do not stare at my face. While I rarely look at other people’s faces, when I do if I see them staring at me if makes me freeze – brain and body just stop.
Wait patiently (or the nearest thing to patient you can manage to simulate 😀 ) and then try to figure out what the voice says.
I do have two different voices – my personal machines have a nice Irish girl voice that I can control inflections (to a degree – it’s a work in progress). My work machine uses the default microsoft voice which is admittedly hard to listen to.
And to address @butterflyinthewell‘s original point – yes, they do walk off as soon as they see me start typing instead of talking.
Mooncustafer 