The opportunity to communicate – impart to another person or persons opinions, ideas, thoughts, feelings and emotions – plays a central part in social life and the defining of a ‘social being’ (Jordan and Kaiser 1996; Rae 1993). Although many disabled people are excluded from such opportunities to communicate and find it difficult to have their voices heard and understood, disability studies has little to say about this exclusion and issues of communication remain theoretically underdeveloped from a social model perspective. Drawing upon the proposition of a sociology of impairment (see Paterson and Hughes 1999) and the idea of ‘temporal barriers’ to communication (see Parr et al. 2003b), this chapter seeks to develop an understanding of ‘communication disablement’ from the standpoint of a person with speech impairment.