Michael has a diagnosis of Glutaric Acidemia Type 1. He is a teenager and included in a mainstreamed educational program. He is a competent communicator and excels in all academic areas. His receptive and expressive language skills are above his age-level.He uses a powered wheelchair for mobility and effectively “zips” around, getting himself wherever he needs or wants to be. Michael has an engaging personality, a great sense of humor and an irresistible smile.
He has been using his DynaVox for close to since he was approximately 7 years old. Michael presently uses Scanning Gateway Pro. He composes his messages using a combination of Gateway's single word vocabulary and spelling with character and word prediction. there isn't anything Michael can't say.
For a scanner Michael's access in amazingly fast, however, compaired to his able-bodied speaking peers communicating in social situations remains challenging. Michael had acheived age-appropriate syntactical long before the 3rd grade. Since then his performance, therapeutic efforts have focused both on improving his narrative writing skills and his pragmatic performance.