Red flags:
1. It doesn't actually show her typing much of anything.
2. The typed passages it shows have perfect punctuation and capitalization...how does she do that when she types with one finger?
3. The texted conversation shown looks far more realistic than the "prepared" statements.
4. Her descriptions of autism look like they could come straight out of a psychology textbook.
Apparently she types very slowly, and often needs lots of encouragement to keep going. I think we can forgive the producers of the video for not showing an hour of footage where she typed a sentence. That doesn’t prove she can do what they claim she can do, but it doesn’t give cause to disbelieve it either.
I think the producers of the video took some artistic license with the passages and showed a recreation of what she wrote, with spelling and grammar cleaned up. It may also be meant to represent the other software she has worked with. According to an interview with her parents and her (short lived) blog, she has worked with lots of programs that include things like selecting words instead of typing them out. The big question, I think, is how much editing of the actual text (rather than just punctuation and capitalization) was done.
Your comment about the texted conversation is also what caught my attention. The few other samples I have been able to find of what appears to be her actual typing appear similar. All lower case, little to no punctuation, misspelling, repeated characters. And the context in those cases seems distinctly different, as well. We find messages like “is he cute” and “i like when dad reads to me at night” and “i would like to ride a snowmobile can we do it”. Those statements, while I think very impressive for her condition, are a far cry from the recreated passages in the video and in her blog.
The video also gives the impression that she was put in front of a keyboard and just miraculously started typing and communicating. The interview with her parents paints a far different story. Since she was diagnosed at the age of 2, they have spent tons of time and money working with her, teaching her letters and words, putting labels on everything, hiring specialists (up to 3 a day) to work with her essentially non-stop, reading to her, working through all kinds of learning and language and communication programs, and providing her with multiple type of software and devices for communicating.
And after many years, she got to a point where she could type some basic communications. And I do tend believe that she was able to type those non-recreated passages. And I think that is an impressive story.
But I do think the story being told is an exaggeration. I would hazard a guess that the “prepared” statements and the posts in her blog are a conglomeration of things she has said, in simple terms, over many days or weeks or months or even years, which her parents or somebody else has put together into a cohesive passage and presented as “what she said”.
I think the true story probably is impressive. But the true story, I think, has the big heart sinker that very, very few parents of autistic children have the time and money and resources to do what these parents did to get just basic communication. I think the parents, having invested so much into this effort, upon achieving some results became ecstatic and wanted to shout messages of hope from the roof tops. And good for them. Btu those messages, while good intentioned, are misleading. A child in this condition, with a very great deal of time, money, resources, and effort may be able to establish some communication. A child in this condition will not be able to simply be sat in front of a computer and begin to wax eloquently, which is the false portrait being painted.
