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It is estimated that around 1% of the population can benefit from some form of AAC system. That percentage sounds small, but that's still hundreds of thousands of people in the UK. Worldwide, it adds up to millions. And it's many more if people with severe hearing and visual impairments are included in the figures.

There are not yet any fully reliable figures on the number of people using AAC or able to benefit from AAC in the UK - this 1% figure is reached by "cobbling together" the results of a number of surveys from other countries and surveys of related conditions (eg severe physical disability / people requiring speech & language therapy / people using or needing AAC in a smaller regional area etc.)

What is certain is that the less speaking ability a person has, the more need there will be for augmentative communication of some description. Some people will need AAC as their main means of expressive communication, lifelong, because of congenital physical or language disability. Some will come to use AAC later on because of acquired disability, through accident or illness. Others may require AAC techniques only occasionally, to clarify or expand upon spoken messages or in particular situations. For some, AAC may be only a transitional stage in the development, ultimately, of speech. Some people can speak adequately, and need AAC only for writing tasks.

There is no single medical condition that indicates (or contra-indicates) the use of augmentative communication; AAC is a functional, not a clinical definition of a set of helping strategies that can be learned by people of all ages, with a wide variety of conditions. For example, users of AAC can be found amongst people with cerebral palsy, learning difficulties, specific speech / language disorder, stroke, head injury, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis, severe cognitive impairment, Freidreich's ataxia, autism, spinal cord injury, complex multiple impairments and more.

Deaf or hearing impaired people who use a full-scale sign language are a special group. People who sign are said to be using sign language as an alternative method of communication in that sign is usually their first or main language and often totally replaces speech. (Whereas most other communication impaired people are supplementing their existing speech attempts, sometimes with sign along with other systems, and are said to use augmentative communication.)

Blind or visually impaired people who use Braille or Moon and / or technology based on these systems may also be thought of as using a specialized form of augmentative and alternative communication, although this does not usually fall to AAC specialists to teach, but more often to specialists in visual impairment.

Some definitions of AAC only refer to speech aids for people who can't speak clearly, and exclude writing aids for people who can't physically write. But we use a wider definition of AAC that insists that writing aids are a form of AAC. Many individuals can neither speak nor write, so a writing aid has to be part of their overall AAC system, along with a speech aid (or, ideally, combined with a speech aid, in the same system). Other individuals may speak adequately, but are perhaps unable to access the curriculum, in education, to record their work in class, or to enter or keep employment, if they have no means of communicating beyond the "here and now". They may need to use AAC for writing tasks.