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LIVING MOUTH TO HAND

BY JUDY CHINITZ

This blog will be a place for me to share my thoughts, ideas and musings, as well as news. In the years since I started Mouth to Hand, I have been so fortunate to watch this movement grow by leaps and bounds. When my first student walked into my basement on May 17, 2020, I knew no other typers in our corner of the world beside my own son. Look at M2H now! I would say the growth of typing is miraculous but in actuality, it is not surprising: when something works, people will come.
When I look at M2H now, it fills me with hope. Look what we can do when we work together!

5/6/2026 0 Comments

Debunked!

Now the NY Times has allowed Dr. Lutz to post a thank you on their Facebook page, reigniting the frenzy on both sides.

(What is better for a news media outlet than a heated, emotional controversy like this? I would be willing to bet they have seen a marked jump in site visits and Facebook posts over this past week. I reckon the only thing better for them is bad weather and bad viruses.)

Anyway, more of my thoughts for your enjoyment.

It is amazing to me that those who scream the word science the loudest are almost always the least scientific. Science is a process of logic, and it seems clear that logic is not the strongest faculty in the opponents of typing/spelling.

Rhetoric is NOT science.

So here is the question of the day: how can something be “debunked” when scientific studies like Dr. Jaswal’s eye-tracking study are being published in major journals? And who exactly is the authority to declare when something is debunked? Is there an official Department of Debunking? Spelling/typing is not debunked according to Dr. Jaswal, a researcher at the University of Virginia. It’s not debunked at Harvard, where recently an eye tracking study was conducted, I believe. It’s not debunked according to Dr. Barry Prizant, probably the most famous speech pathologist in the country. In other words - major authority figures in science say it is an area of legitimate study.

So who says it’s debunked?

The word “debunked” is a rhetorical catch phrase, but in actuality, it is 100% meaningless. It sounds great - so authoritative. So perhaps we believers of typing/spelling should remember that the best defense is a good offense: I officially declare that the arguments against typing/spelling for communication are debunked!

I have as much authority to declare that, pounding my virtual fist upon the table, as any other nonscientist.

So let’s get back to science. As I pointed out in my previous post, all science starts with an observation. We observe our children typing, and they are typing things we cannot predict. How can something that is clearly working be not working? Since I know it works - as I do it all day every day - I will formulate my hypothesis: typing/spelling works to give nonspeakers a voice. I think I have proven that hypothesis, so let’s move on to the remaining questions we have yet to answer.

No one on our side of the debate says that there are no questions. We all KNOW there are questions surrounding this: why exactly do we need to hold the board? Why is it so hard for our guys to type without a CP? What exactly is the CP providing that allows them to overcome their inherent disability? Why is message passing hard under testing circumstances? How can we better make this skill fully independent for our children? Are there better ways to teach this? Etc. We beg scientists to help us because there is nothing more that we all want - parents, friends, professionals, and most of all, the nonspeakers themselves - than to see all of them independent!

Thus far, we are crying in the wilderness. What answers has science given us? In my 30 years in autism (Alex was diagnosed at 1:00 pm on March 22, 1996…but who’s counting), what solutions have we been given?

That’d be a big, fat NOTHING.

Anyway, back to my discussion of logic…

When I was 17, my 16 year old cousin - whom I dearly loved and forever miss - passed away. The day of her funeral, I hid in the bushes outside my aunt and uncle’s house, crying hysterically. My big brother found me and sat down to talk. “There is no god!” I said, grief stricken. “Well, Judy,” he said thinking for a moment, “People a lot smarter than you believe in god, so maybe you should maintain an open mind.”

Every time I find myself becoming definitive, I take myself down a peg or two, reminding myself that there is a possibility - even if it’s very small - that I may be wrong…especially if someone really intelligent disagrees with me. I looked into typing/spelling finally because my very, VERY brilliant friend, Ginnie, told me it was real. I didn’t believe a blessed word but…hey…there was a chance I was wrong.

And of course, it turned out I wasn’t just wrong. I was WRONG.

And you know what? I survived. My head didn’t explode or anything! I lived to tell the tale of my wrongness.

Oh, wait! I got it! I debunked my own belief that spelling was nonsense!

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5/3/2026 3 Comments

Open Letter to the Editors of the New York Times

By now, most of you are probably aware of the OpEd piece that appeared this past week in the New York Times, which reiterated the same-old-same-old, tired arguments against all methods of typing/spelling for communication. What strikes me every time I read these sorts of things is the complete lack of rational thought they reflect. Below is a letter I wrote in response, which I sent to the editors of the Times, but which won't of course be printed.

One more point I could have added is this: because of several (maybe 4 or 5) instances of false reporting which occurred about 40 years ago, our opponents claim typing to communicate is "dangerous." Following that logic:

1. How many instances of false claims were there per capita in the speaking population over the same period of time? No one ever lets us know those statistics. (False reporting of abuse is, in fact, just as likely in those who speak, because unfortunately, people lie to promote their own ends. One of our students lives in a group home where a speaker called OPWDD once or twice a week reporting false abuses because she felt like it.)

2. Dangerous? Really? Is it less dangerous for our nonspeakers to have no method of communication? I venture to say that our children who have been abused (listen to just one example: Anthony Piccolino's story which was aired on the podcast, Amplifying Nonspeaking Voices, which is now also on his blog) would disagree with that assessment. There are safeguards in place to verify allegations of abuse. But there are no safeguards in place to protect those who cannot speak to report abuse.

So back to my letter:

Dear Sir or Madam:
I am a New York State licensed special educator and a mother of a 32 year old nonspeaker who types to communicate. As both a professional who works in the field, and as a parent, I found Dr. Amy Lutz' recent OpEd extraordinarily logically faulted.

I understand healthy skepticism. I had my own grave doubts about typing for communication. I had unsuccessfully tried for 25 years to teach my own son the alphabet - or so I thought. To say I was skeptical when I started this process is an understatement: it's more accurate to say that I quite literally could not imagine a reality in which my son had language and was not profoundly cognitively impaired. What drove me to give it a shot is that it certainly could not hurt to try - if nothing else, we would be practicing letter recognition. There are no words to describe the shock when my own son showed me that I was 100% wrong: every notion I had about who he is, who nonspeakers are, was polar opposite to the reality.

I opened the Mouth to Hand Learning Center here in Westchester, NY, where I have now taught hundreds of nonspeakers to spell/type for communication. In my now 30 years in autism, it is the only teaching method that actually produces results - not just in terms of communication. So many of the "behaviors" (aggression, self-injury, destruction of property, etc.) that lead people to dismiss our children as cognitively impaired, vanish.

There are several questions I think those who unilaterally dismiss these methods need to consider:

1. Is it possible that a profoundly cognitively impaired individual, who does not have language, can read cues that are so subtle that no one can actually see (including Dr. Lutz) so that they can write 2000-word essays in front of proctors, as my son did to pass his high school equivalency exam? Bear in mind that there are 33 characters on an ordinary letterboard and 80-100 keys on a keyboard. This means that every time a student hits a letter correctly on a letterboard, she had a 1 in 33 chance of doing so. Calculate then the odds of typing 10,000 letters correctly...with cues so subtle that no one has actually ever been able to establish what those cues are.

2. Is it possible that every professor, at institutions ranging from Rollins College to Cal Berkeley to UCLA to Columbia University to Harvard, etc. from which nonspeakers have graduated are all so unbelievably stupid and gullible that they were bamboozled by their nonspeaking students? Apparently, only Amy Lutz is intelligent enough to KNOW that this is all a con job.

3. Are the thousands of parents who are of normal to superior intellect, many with advanced degrees from illustrious institutions, all delusional? We are talking mass psychosis on a global scale at this point.

4. Why are the studies that support the veracity of spelling dismissed? It's not that she included them in her piece. And more than that: all science starts with an observation and that leads to the formation of a hypothesis. Let us then look at Amy Lutz' hypothesis: thousands and thousands of nonspeakers around the world, all of whom are profoundly cognitively impaired with no language, are managing to spell/type coherent English utilizing a system of prompts that are impossible to actually see, but which must be there because these individuals are cognitively impaired and have no language.

Then let's consider an alternative hypothesis to explain the facts: thousands and thousands of nonspeakers around the world are spelling/typing in coherent English because they are not, in fact, cognitively impaired and have language, and are instead, severely motor challenged (which aligns with the literature on autism, which acknowledges that almost 90% of those with autism have a motor impairment) which inhibits their ability to communicate.

The fact is that what we know about what we now call "autism" is a minute fraction of what we need to know. To summarily dismiss the experience of thousands and thousands of people, many of whom are professionals in the field, is not science. In fact, it is not actually rational.

Sincerely,
Judy Chinitz

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