When communication breaks down between an autistic person and someone else, what happens in the first ninety seconds often shapes what follows.
This is Protocol B in The Autistic Standard, and it exists because the standard response to a communication breakdown reliably makes it worse.
Someone does not answer immediately. So the other person repeats the question, louder, faster or rephrased. Then adds context. Then asks if everything is alright. Then, if the silence continues, interprets it: as rudeness, as evasion, as refusal.
Each of those steps adds processing load to a person who is already at capacity. The intervention intended to help is the thing that closes the window.
Processing time is not thinking time. A person may have understood the question completely and be unable to assemble a spoken response at conversational speed, particularly under stress, in noise, or when the stakes are visible.
For some people speech becomes unavailable altogether while comprehension remains intact. Being spoken to more urgently in that state is not clarifying. It is compounding.
Stop adding input. Silence is not a vacuum that needs filling.
Wait longer than feels natural. In training we ask people to count, because a pause that feels interminable to the speaker is usually far shorter than it seems.
Offer another channel without ceremony: writing, typing, later. Not as a concession, as an equivalent option.
Do not interpret the silence aloud. "You seem upset" requires the person to now manage your reading of them on top of everything else.
Then, when it resolves, do not debrief the breakdown. Return to the substance.
Because it has to be usable by someone who is themselves stressed, in a meeting, in a classroom or at a service counter, without preparation. A protocol that requires calm reflection will not be used in the moment it is needed.
Multi-modal access is treated in the framework as an ordinary operating standard rather than an accommodation. If a person can answer in writing as easily as aloud, no breakdown has occurred at all. It was never a communication problem. It was a channel problem.