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Augmentative and Alternative Communication

What is AAC?

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) refers to a set of tools and strategies used to solve everyday communication challenges for people who cannot speak, or whose speech is limited or difficult to understand. "Augmentative" means to add to someone's existing speech. "Alternative" means to replace speech that is not functional. It provides independence and a voice to those who need it most.

The Modified Fitzgerald Key

The Modified Fitzgerald Key is a traditional structural system used to organize words, symbols, or phrases logically from left to right to facilitate sentence generation. It groups parts of speech by category and color-codes them, allowing the user to quickly construct grammatically correct thoughts based on typical sentence structure (Who + Doing + What + Where).

Category / Part of Speech	Traditional Color Mapping	Function / Example
Miscellaneous / Social	Pink	Exclamations, greetings, social words (Hello, Please)
People / Pronouns	Yellow	Subjects of the sentence (I, You, Mother, Doctor)
Actions / Verbs	Green	What the subject is doing (Want, Go, Eat, Stop)
Descriptions / Adjectives	Blue	Modifiers and descriptive words (Big, Hot, Happy)
Objects / Nouns	Orange	Things or targets of actions (Apple, Book, Car)
Places / Times	White or Purple	Locations and prepositions (Home, Outside, In, Under)

Open Resources Notification: LocutusAAC proudly utilizes ARASAAC (Aragonese Center of Augmentative and Alternative Communication) educational and graphic resources. These symbols and materials are property of the Government of Aragón (Spain) and are created by Sergio Palao for ARASAAC, which distributes them under the Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. As such LocutusAAC will always be free, and distributed under the same license.