FEMALE NARRATOR: A title: Jake's Literacy Development During His School-Age Years. Jake's mother, Dee. 
DEE: The literacy development thing is something I'm really passionate about and something that Jake has taught me how important it is to make sure we are teaching and giving him access to literacy activities. The more I researched it and learned how communication is our foundation for literacy and the more I understood about that, the more clear it became to how we are going to do it. He had an amazing teacher through most of his grade school who understood by using symbols and giving him appropriate color coding and contrasting for his cortical vision impairment, which we didn't even know that's really what we were dealing with at the time, but she knew how to do that, and set up a schedule system that he learned so quickly and even though he was really sick during those times he learned how to match those pictures and what those pictures meant. So he was beginning reading skills in grade school by using that color coding system that she gave him and as the years went by actually using a computer system was our best, we saw he was most responsive to. So he spent lots of years playing, just playing with software that exposed him to letter sounds, letter spelling, to reading stories, because he wouldn't look at a regular book. He absolutely would throw the book at you. He would throw markers at you but if you put it on a lighted background screen he would see it and want to interact with that literacy material.
NARRATOR: While Dee spoke photos showed a clipboard with picture symbols attached with velcro, a communication device on someone's lap, and Jake operating his communication device. A title: Jake's Literacy Now.
DEE: We ended up going and pursuing more and more communication device systems. Evaluating until we finally found a system that was amazing for him and like I said he's been spelling words with that system and practicing communicating... 
(Dee to Jake as he reaches in front of her) Okay, let me get your device over here so you can see. Are you going to talk to me while I'm talking? 
...And most recently on his iPad we've downloaded an alternate keyboard that has contrasting letters and he is messaging people with a little bit of help in being able to read the word prediction words but some of them he's reading on his own because of the contrast and the size presented there.