Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Buffy

A pretty amazing story of an autistic woman is running on CNN today (I imagine CNN International too).

I saw it – with all he Autistic Ed folk and video recorders in my family, there was little chance I could miss it.

As I often am, I had misgivings about how the documentary was produced and edited. Clearly, many of the scenes had been audio edited to make Amanda appear more typically conversationally responsive – if you carefully watch her fingers you’ll notice that, in many of the shots, she is not typing enough to even trigger shorthand commands to produce the synthesizes speech responses to Sanjay Gupta’s questions – in one shot, he asks a question, and she “replies” without touching the keyboard at all!

I wish documentary makers would not do this sort of thing. In addition to being unrealistic, it engenders suspicions of a “man behind the curtain” among the observant and skeptical.

None the less, I was amazed by what I saw, and plan to learn as much as I can about this amazing, atypical woman. It had a big impact on the my autistic educator friends and family – they’re already planning to put keyboards in the hands of as many of their kids as possible. Hopefully, the kids, educators, and keyboards will survive the experience, and, maybe, some success come of it.

Amanda Baggs . CNN .