How We Grade Evidence
Our articles make confident claims — "AAC does not delay speech," "there is no readiness test." This page is why we get to write that way: every claim is checked against real research before it ships, and the confidence of the writing is calibrated to the strength of the evidence behind it. Never more, and — just as deliberately — never less.
Three commitments
- Every factual claim is cited — to peer-reviewed research, clinical guidelines, or clearly labeled expert and lived-experience sources, at the point of the claim, with a full source list at the end of every article.
- No fabricated authority. A real source or the sentence doesn't ship. Where a claim rests on a small study or an extrapolation, the article says so in plain language.
- Human review. Every article is reviewed against its sources by a person before publishing, and re-reviewed when the science moves.
The grades
Each article carries an overall evidence grade, shown near its sources:
- Strong — broad agreement across multiple peer-reviewed studies, systematic reviews, or clinical-authority consensus.
- Moderate — real peer-reviewed evidence, but limited, mixed, or emerging.
- Limited / Contested — little direct evidence or active debate. We say so plainly rather than implying certainty that doesn't exist.
- Lived experience — first-person knowledge from AAC users and autistic authors. Not ranked against clinical evidence; a distinct and valued authority, labeled as such.
About the one-line answers
Every article opens with a short answer — its verdict. Those aren't headlines written for effect: each is the article's conclusion stated exactly as strongly as its cited evidence supports. When the honest answer is "yes, with limits," the verdict says that. When the evidence is unusually clear — and in AAC research, sometimes it is — the verdict is allowed to sound like it.
What we won't do
- Promise outcomes for your child. No study licenses that, so neither do we.
- Dress up contested findings as settled ones — or bury settled findings under reflexive hedging.
- Write sales pages disguised as articles. Each article must be useful to a family that never buys anything from us.