When you’re thinking about literacy, AAC, and whether your child is getting the right tools to learn, you don’t have to wait for the school to bring it up. As a parent, you have the right to ask questions, request assessments, and push for supports that help your child communicate, read, and write in ways that actually work for them. We explore how AAC can foster literacy in our article AAC Users Can Learn to Read and Write — Here's How. With regard to literacy, AAC can’t be an afterthought in the IEP; it must be thoughtfully planned for.
To get more information on what an IEP should include and what to watch out for, we spoke to Ali Steers, MA, CCC-SLP, ATS, speech language pathologist and founder of Steers AAC Language & Speech; Rebecca Gianforte, BCBA, former special education teacher and current doctoral student at Vanderbilt University; and Elizabeth Burnett Rossi, PhD, assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
As a parent, you can request an assessment of your child at any time. If you have a specific area of concern, such as AAC, you can write a brief letter to the school’s special education specialist or therapist requesting an evaluation or assessment. If your child is not already using AAC, ask for an assessment. As a parent, you have the right to request that different devices be included in the assessment so that your child can have a trial of multiple programs. You can also request video of your child using the devices. Does one device have very limited words available for use? Is a device missing a keyboard or letterboard to offer support for typing?
If you already have AAC, ask the teacher and the speech therapist to explore how it can be used during structured literacy instruction. Also, many AAC platforms have preset pages that include vocabulary for common children’s literature (e.g., Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) that can be used for answering comprehension questions. It is easy for vocabulary to be added for other books if the teacher is able to collaborate with the AAC specialist before the class where it will be used.
Here’s a cheat sheet of the SETT framework Dr. Rossi discusses in the clip — what IEP and school teams should assess:
First, understand that reading, writing, and language go together, and together they’re what help a child become a literate adult. As Dr. Rossi explains, even when other needs feel more urgent (especially when kids are young), literacy can’t be put on the back burner. These skills take years to develop for all children, so they need to be addressed every day in instruction and clearly reflected in the IEP as functional, meaningful goals.
Dr. Rossi gives parents a few more tips for incorporating AAC into an IEP.
Gianforte encourages parents to take a close look at what kinds of literacy goals are included in their child’s IEP. If a child isn’t reading yet, the focus shouldn’t be only on memorizing sight words, even though that’s a common fallback because reading is hard. It should also include emergent literacy goals.
Many kids can learn letter names and letter sounds pretty quickly, especially with repetition. But then something confusing happens: even though they know the sounds, they still can’t really read words. The missing piece is often phonological awareness. That’s the ability to hear, notice, and play with the sounds in spoken language — like hearing that c-a-t blends together to make cat.
Parents often ask why their child can’t read if they know their sounds. “Because it doesn’t have to do with print,” Gianforte explains. “It is all about spoken language and how we hear the sounds of spoken language. It’s a language skill, and most of our students, if they’re using a device, have language deficits — receptive or expressive, or a combination of both. And so that means teaching phonological awareness is much harder, but not impossible.”
It often takes more time, more support, and more intentional teaching. Progress can be harder to see, which is why teams sometimes fall back on teaching sight words to memorize. Memorizing words can look like progress, but it limits how many words a child can read to only the ones they’ve been taught. When we focus on decoding, Gianforte tells us, we open the door to reading many more words, not just a small, memorized list.
Her tip: “Be really mindful of the different types of literacy skills that are in their IEPs, and be an advocate and ask for different components. Ask about, ‘Where is my child at with phonological awareness? Where are they at with their letter sounds?’ And I think a lot of people don’t yet incorporate that phonetic keyboard on their device, so ask the school to help them embed a phonetic keyboard. And how can we incorporate goals that our students are communicating, but using multimodality, so not saying there’s only one way.”
For students with communication challenges, be creative in the way you measure their reading or writing progress. It’s important to focus on what skill is being tested. When we are testing reading, for example, we often have to think outside of the box to ensure that the lack of ability to communicate in spoken language doesn't get in the way of testing reading ability. For students with speech challenges, it isn’t always necessary for the student to speak the word to demonstrate that they are reading. They might use nonspoken communication, such as an AAC device or ASL signs, or they can match words to cards to demonstrate comprehension. Another way to test the student’s ability to read is for an adult to speak the word and the student to choose a flashcard from a field of cards by picking it up or pointing.
Nonspeaking students can have many accommodations that increase their success on reading comprehension goals and writing goals. For example, they might have access to alternative means of answering the question, such as choosing picture cards from a field of three or using a premade page on their AAC device. Sample goals might include:
Example reading IEP goals using AAC
“By (the next annual IEP), when given a passage from a high-interest illustrated storybook previously read aloud, the student will read the passage and answer four who, where, what, when questions by choosing picture cards from a field of three, with 90% accuracy as measured by teacher data over five opportunities.”
“By (the next annual IEP), when given a list of six category word cards, the student will read the word and find the matching page on their AAC device, and identify (using total communication) three words that fit that category, with 80% accuracy as measured by teacher data over three opportunities.”
"Within one year of IEP signature date, given a short narrative or expository text with pictures accompanying it, student will utilize multimodal communication (no-tech, low-tech, high-tech AAC) to generate a response relevant to the characters, settings, or events from the text, given visual support as needed to navigate to a response relevant to the text, in four out of five opportunities."
Example IEP goals for writing using AAC
“By next annual IEP, using a text-generating app such as Clicker software or AAC tools, with minimal verbal prompting, the student will select words from a word bank to compose a complete sentence with at least one descriptive word [subject + (adverb) verb + (adjective) object] in response to a picture, prompt, or question in four of five sessions, with correct syntax and appropriate punctuation, as measured by writing samples and teacher observation.”
“By the next annual IEP review, when provided a writing prompt and given the opportunity to self-select a written output method (e.g., whole words with their communication book/device or letters via their electronic or non-electronic alternative pencil) the child will formulate a pronoun-fronted phrase of at least three words in response to the prompt in 4/5 opportunities as measured by data collection and work samples."
“Provided with a teacher-selected topic, student will complete a cloze sentence by using the dynamic display speech-generating device to choose on-topic information, provided visual support as needed to navigate through familiar folders within the device.”
“In one year from IEP signature date, student will demonstrate the ability to complete a structured journaling task by composing one sentence utilizing the dynamic display speech-generating device to describe an activity from the school day, provided visual support as needed to navigate through familiar folders within the device, in four out of five opportunities.”
You can find more sample goals for speech and language, including receptive and expressive goals from preschool to high school, in our article IEP Goals for Speech and Language.
Speaking of goals, there is something parents should watch out for, and if this happens, it’s a red flag. Steers urges families to pay close attention to what happens to literacy goals as kids reach middle and high school. She often sees IEP teams shift away from reading and writing once a child is 12, 13, or 14, replacing those goals with only “functional” skills such as sorting colors or daily living tasks such as doing laundry. And she’s clear about this: that shift deserves a second look.
Yes, your child may need more time. Yes, learning may look different. But if your child has shown the ability to learn — and most have — then literacy shouldn’t disappear from the plan. As Steers puts it, all children learn if they are taught, regardless of the severity of their disability.
And this timeline probably won’t look like that of typically developing students. “With most typically developing kids, we hit all of that early literacy stuff in the early elementary grades, and then as they get older, we start to drop that off because now they’ve acquired reading and writing fluency,” Steers says. “Children with disabilities need more exposure, but that doesn’t mean that suddenly they turn 15 or 16 or 18 and we say, ‘You know what, we’re not going to work on literacy anymore.’ It’s a worthwhile goal because, especially for children who are nonspeaking, it opens up the door to completely autonomous communication.”
If you’re in an IEP meeting and notice literacy quietly falling off the plan, it’s okay to ask: “Why are we stopping now?”
While every child will have different strengths and needs and different devices and systems they prefer using, one thing is clear, as Steers explains: AAC should be the language of instruction, meaning it’s not only used by a child to demonstrate what they know, but in all areas. The adult should be using the system to interact with a child constantly throughout the day so the child is learning that system.
At school, this matters for literacy too. When the AAC system becomes the language of instruction, students can use it to talk about books, ideas, and learning. “So creating this as close to an immersive environment for our AAC users, where we have more AAC users in a given place, helps them to learn.” Steers explains this more in the clip below.
So we’ve discussed reading receptively and putting a sentence together on an AAC device, and the controversies around those changes. But parents might be wondering if these changes would be considered modifications.
Gianforte explains that there’s an important distinction between modifications and accommodations. If a team is changing the level of the work or what a student is being asked to learn, that’s a modification. If they’re providing a tool or system — such as AAC, audio, or visual supports — that helps the student access the same curriculum, that’s an accommodation.
Steers adds that, especially when it comes to literacy, support should be based on a child’s actual learning needs, not their disability label. She walks through what this can look like in practice. For example, if a student with significant vision and motor challenges is in a general education eighth-grade classroom reading an eighth-grade text, the team first needs to ask whether the child truly needs a modified curriculum. A modification might involve changing the language, simplifying the text, or altering how the material is presented to make it easier to understand. If a modification isn’t necessary, an accommodation may be all that’s needed to give the child access. That could include enlarged text, an audiobook, a paraprofessional or peer reading aloud during class, or partner reading activities — all ways to support access without lowering expectations.
As Steers emphasizes, “Even if this child is on a modified curriculum, we have to have evidence that they need particular curriculum modifications to access their curriculum. And a lot of the time it’s just ‘you are an individual with a disability’ — but where’s the evidence to support that this child does not understand the grade-level text? Do we have that evidence? Because if we don’t have that evidence, then this child should be on the grade-level text, and they can have an audiobook version of it. And even if we do have some evidence that this child might need a modified text, we can do both. We can have them access a modified text at the same time that they have the text that they’re reading at home with their parents or they’re listening to an audiobook of that text.”
Teachers don’t always come into the classroom already trained to support a student with complex communication or learning needs, but both Dr. Rossi and Gianforte stress that teacher training really matters. Dr. Rossi explains that both teachers’ training and their beliefs about a student’s ability to become a literacy learner directly impact success. If educators aren’t supported or don’t feel confident using AAC, it can limit how much your child’s device is used throughout the day.
Gianforte adds that every district is different, which is why it’s so important to build AAC training into the IEP for everyone who works with your child. She reminds parents that you are your child’s best advocate: if you think training is needed, say it and stick with it. Dr. Rossi echoes this, noting that teachers often need parents to advocate for them to get the support they need. That advocacy takes effort, but it pays off for both teachers and students.
Dr. Rossi adds that the school speech therapist can help provide support to the student and the teachers on how to use the AAC device in the classroom. “The AAC device really should be a communication tool that they use across the day, across all sorts of interactions that they have. And ideally, the AAC device would go home to the family as well.”
Parents have the right to request parent and staff training in their child’s IEP! Some schools may not be familiar with AAC-friendly or accessible literacy curricula, so coming into meetings informed can make a big difference. Knowing what approaches exist — and asking how literacy will be taught — helps keep literacy on the table.
Teachers may need special training to successfully work with a student with a disability. For instance, a general education teacher may have trouble navigating a student’s behavior, communication, or motivation needs. Providing this teacher with time to consult with the child’s special education teacher can help the gen ed teacher learn strategies to have more successful interactions with the child. These consultation periods should be written directly into the child’s IEP. If a child has unique and specific needs, this could also include attending a special training program or bringing in an outside expert.
AAC is often introduced to support communication or speech goals, but many teams also want to use it for reading and writing. That can bring up big, understandable questions for families. Is it okay to use the device for all of this? Will it become too much? How do we keep it consistent across school and home?
Steers, who is a speech therapist, reminds us of something really important: a child’s AAC system isn’t just a learning tool, it’s their voice. It’s how they connect, relate, and show who they are. As she puts it, “We don’t want this to become work, because this is their voice.”
She explains that problems can arise when AAC is treated like a test or a worksheet. For example, if an adult asks a child to describe the weather using their device and then corrects them for saying the “wrong” word, that can send the message that their communication is only acceptable when it matches what the adult expects. “We’ve just violated the cardinal rule of there should never be wrongness with one’s words,” Steers says. This doesn’t typically happen with those of use who don’t use AAC devices. In typical conversation, adults aren’t told they’re “wrong” for sharing a thought. We respond, clarify, and keep the conversation going.
When AAC turns into right-or-wrong work, children may stop seeing it as their way to communicate and start seeing it as something adults use to control what they say. Steers emphasizes that AAC should always remain a safe, respected space, a place where a child can say what they want, be heard, and be known in the world.
“This principle alone leads to AAC abandonment most of the time,” Steers tells us, “because well-meaning, lovely, fantastic, caring educators take devices and they turn them into a means of children answering their questions and saying what they want them to say, when they want them to say it. Devices end up being used to do work and engage with the curriculum, instead of being used as their voice to connect with peers and people.”
So what does work?
There isn’t one right answer. What works will look different for every child. But Steers shares a helpful guiding principle for families and teams: a child’s AAC system is their voice, and they should be able to choose whether academic work lives there (or somewhere else!).
For some kids, the most supportive setup is keeping schoolwork separate from their communication system. That doesn’t mean academics can’t be added to a device. It absolutely can — and should — be available. For example, if the class is discussing the American Revolution, that vocabulary can be programmed into the AAC system so the child has the option to use their device to engage with the class during that discussion.
Steers explains that for some kids, being required to use their AAC system only for school topics can feel deeply limiting. A child might want to use their device to joke, be silly, or share something playful with their classmates, and when an adult redirects them back to an academic page and shuts that down, it can unintentionally strip away their personality.
“What we should not be doing is navigating a child to the page where that topic lives, and then mandating that the child talk about the topic at hand. So if they want to, they can, it’s there. If not, then they can do their work another way,” Steers tells us. That “other way” might look like:
“I’m not saying that children shouldn’t do work. Children go to school. They need to do work. But their AAC system is for connecting, relating, feeling safe, feeling like they can be who they are, not for them to comply, not for them to answer other people’s questions and not for them to say things that other people want them to say,” Steers explains.
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