"Not scientifically validated," is being awfully generous. It doesn't work, plain and simple. The facilitator is the one responding in 100% of cases.
You not only can see the father guiding his hand, but Daniel isn't even looking at the board. I would challenge anyone to respond to a question by poking at an iPad, without looking, while someone else holds their hand.
Because a autistic person don't look directly to you don't mean is not looking at you. Is very common to them of see "away" and pay attention to thing in front or in a side.
The problem is, is VERY hard to decipher what a autistic person is doing and why.
Given that "facilitated communication" has been shown time and again to be the results of the facilitator rather than the impaired individual, this story mainly underscores how little credibility one should give to completion of a Coursera course as a demonstration of learning.
I guess there's a very simple test - get the 'facilitator' to leave the room, show or tell the autistic person a word, bring the facilitator back, and ask the person to spell the word. With the picture, and the lines about 'steadying his hand'... this just reads like a really dark Onion article.
It is hard to judge whether or not this is a case of facilitated communication just by that photo, it could just be that the whole family was posed for the photo for the article.
1) The editor(s)/photographer(s) probably wanted a nice photo for this post, like whole family being working together to the same issue. The mother may seem un-involved if both the son and the father would focus on the screen. Or maybe for some other reason it was just the most sweet-looking picture out of the series.
IMO, it is easily to get distracted while working in somewhat unfamiliar conditions. I can easily imagine that, if someone takes a photo of me coding in front of my laptop, I will end up looking weird and distracted because I would be nervous about camera.
I am pretty sure that if someone wanted to fake it(even unintentionally), he would pick more "realistic" photo.
2) Just saying it wasn't validated doesn't mean it can't (and doesn't) work. Of course there is a link to wikipedia entry, but there are mixed data, and far from the claim "It doesn't work, plain and simple" (to which you agreed).
30-40 years ago it was mainstream to deny intelligence in non-human animals. But now, there are evidence that animals are intelligent: crowns learning to use tools, dolphins passing mirror test, parrots learning to count objects(and doing a lot of ther cool stuff).
I believe you should provide some evidence for such claims. Like I said the wikipedia entry(to which you linked) contains mixed data.
There are some positive data, like: "A study by Bernadi and Tuzzi finding that the communication of FC users displayed the characteristics of valid communication recorded that of its 50 subjects 13 had achieved “full and independent control of the method” while 37 “had reached a high level of independence”"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication
If you look at the picture in the article, he isn't even looking while his father guides his hand.