What is ABA like?

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Heh. Very true. I have not yet met anyone who didn't have communication skills, except for people in comas. I have met people who could not use words or symbols of any kind; but even they communicated, by using vocalization or body posture or facial expression. Sometimes you had to know them well to figure it out; but still... ideas were getting from Brain A to Brain B, and that's communication.

Yeah, come to that, ABA couldn't work on someone who couldn't communicate-- at least receptively if not expressively.

"Communication" is a really broad category, though; for example, figuring out that if you hand someone a PECS card you can get a cookie is communication, even if you have no idea what those "word" noises they keep making are. But one can teach a child to use PECS without resorting to repetitive trial-and-reward sessions...

Toilet training? Let me count the ways...
Not having to wear diapers is a great sensory advantage. It's a new thing to learn and you can be proud of learning it. You're using the bathroom like other people do. You no longer have to get undressed in the middle of the day to have a diaper changed. Your parents tell you that they are pleased with you. You no longer have to deal with the smell--which, being sensitive, you most likely can detect even with good diapers. You no longer risk skin problems.

Just off the top of my head...

Learning is its own reward. Really. Even when you are frightened of new things, once they are no longer new you become proud of having learned them.

I just want to tell something to all of you. Yesterday I started to read "The ME book" by Lovaas. The book contains ABA principles to teach to autistic children and it was released in 1981. Well, there's a whole chapter that explains when and why phisical punishment is admitted. It's disgusting, and adversives is not the only thing I disagree with. The author had prejudices that is hard to accept in a scientist. The book is quite difficult to find and it's not traslated in italian, so I'm one of the few parents who is able to read and criticize it.
I never found a quote of that chapter and I now I know why.
The method that I'm using to teach my son to speak can be defined ABA-based, but it's not the method described in the book. Adversives are not used, stimming is not repressed and the child is motivated using positive rewards (cuddles, cartoons...). He is happy to have therapy with me rather than with therapists because he knows I will entertain him.
He requests me to sit down and start therapy if I'm late....
The tecnique still in use is discrete trial teaching, that in my opinion is ok to teach young children (my son is 3.5yo) because it reduces frustration if the child finds the request difficult. NT children of that age are not required to be teached, but unfortunately autistic children are, so I think that the tecnique must be the easier. I would hope that no one uses the method described in the book and I think that ABA today is completely different.

Lovaas was not someone to be hold up as an example of human right respect and he had many prejudices, but to be honest he did something that no one did before. He documented for the fist time that autistic children are not hopeless people to be insitutionalized and forgotten. This, aside of human feeling we can have for him.
I'd like that autistic people will give attention to educative methods applied to autistic children, because it is a forgotten field. In the last 30 years, research did not so much. If I knew other scientifically proven methods, I would consider them, but ABA seems to be the only method supported by any scientific evidence. And, that evidence dates 30 years ago, when ABA was different from today.

Actually, long before Lovaas, Kanner documented that autistic people weren't hopeless people to be institutionalized and forgotten. And while he did have some offensive views, they were far less offensive than Lovaas's.