A fascinating couple of papers that Simon Judge notes in his blog about the design and abandonment of AAC systems

“the role of communication aids in an individuals’ communication is subtle and not a simple binary ‘used or not used’”.

What I find really neat is Zoë’s paper and the creation of a model

“This model consists of a communication loop – where experiences of prior communication attempts feed into decisions about whether to communicate and what method to use to communicate – each of which were influenced by considerations of the importance of the message, the time taken, who the communication partner was, the environment the communication is taking place in (physical and social) and the personal context and preferences of the individual

The “choice” of when and how much to use an AAC device is down to the user. We shouldn’t see this as abandonment.