Therapy

A Speech-Language Pathologist’s scope of practice is broad, and a detailed description is frankly overwhelming; in brief, we provide therapy (including evaluations) for the following expressive and receptive communication skills:

• Speech sounds/signs: (super)fine motor processing, planning, execution
• Language: word forms/meanings, creating sentences, social skills
• Fluency: stuttering, cluttering
• Voice (quality): pitch, loudness, resonance, vocal hygiene, transgender changes
• Cognition: attention, memory, (dis)inhibition, planning, decision making, mirroring
• Sensory (processing and integration): sensation, transduction, perception, and awareness
• Feeding and Swallowing: oral through esophageal phases
• Early skills: joint attention, voice and body signals with intent to communicate
• Gestures: facial expression, body language, visuomanual signals

You can see how these give rise to such areas as:

• listening and auditory processing
• characteristics of autism
• augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)
• such academic areas as literacy (e.g., reading, writing, spelling) and numeracy

We want this list to be family-friendly, so it is neither technical nor exhaustive… it simply portrays the gist of what we do.

When I feel more motivated, i’ll also talk about what an Assistive Technology Professional does.

Training

• Staff training in social communication skills
• Setting up switch-access training systems
• Maintaining AAC systems
• Tutorial about CD therapy in Intensely Special Education (ISE)
• Tutorial about harmful quackery that keeps cropping up in CD therapy (Hydra Oil: Careless Therapy Labels).

Apps

We have been creating apps (iPadOS and macOS) to help improve people’s quality of access. An education service district typically cannot afford to also be a software development company, so all of them were developed outside of any concurrent employment (there or elsewhere), and are offered for free.

Now that these six are all fully supported, we will focus some attention on a couple of programs that should be of more general commercial interest... about which we shall in the meantime remain mysterious.

Here you can find our detailed Privacy Policy, and Terms and Conditions; in short, our apps collect no personal information… they were designed to be safe for use with students in schools.

Research

We have not been deeply involved in active research pursuits for a while now, due to our shift in focus towards the application of tangible products in educational settings; however, our therapy, training, and apps are all grounded in a considerable body of R&D (as well as in our fundamental expertise in statistical analysis, the evaluation of research quality, and so on).

So let us know if you have a collaborative project in mind.

We do have some white papers available regarding the existing Clyr search engine technology, namely: an introduction, an illustrative metaphor, and a description of what makes it distinct from other systems. We have a paper on semeiognomy basics, but that material has all been incorporated into the tutorial on communication disorders therapy in intensely special education.

Other

Clyr Ink Press tends to be the face of our professional interaction with the community (give or take), whereas the Ymaginary Studios site  houses our personal activities more generally.

So those interests are also represented, whether or not they are ever associated with services and projects.

Pricing

Apps: Our current suite of six education apps are all offered for free. Contact us if you are interested in having us create apps for you, as the cost varies widely depending upon the project (e.g., how much of the actual programming we are doing, how much is design consultation for an app of your creation, whether the app is intended to be released for free for education, and so on). When it comes to apps being developed for education, which will also be offered for free, we likewise tend to offer our consultation free of charge.

Training: Access to the tutorial material on this site is free, We provide some guest presentations to classrooms for free, such as instruction for new teachers. For staff training at a for-profit venture, you will have to contact individual practitioners.

Therapy: Clyr no longer acts as a business for whom SLP/ATP people work, as such, but some of us still see clients in private practice. There is a chance that someone would find this information to be helpful for writing up a budget for a proposal or something, so we will leave it here just in case. Sessions for individuals (and small groups) are $120 for a 50-minute ‘hour’. Formal evaluations (including AAC/AT) are $120 (to cover report production), plus $120 per 60-minute hour, which typically takes two to three hours. (Consequent implementation of systems is approached as training, below.) Observations are $60 per hour (i.e., when there is no significant direct interaction with the client), whether that is informal (e.g., to render opinions about strategies for a job site) or as an indirect part of a formal evaluation (e.g., observing at home or in a classroom). The service required for ongoing maintenance of AAC/AT systems is so varied that the pricing must be discussed individually; that said, the ultimate goal is to bring a client and their family to be independent of external support.

Apps