Technology Supports Specific to Dyslexia
- Lianne Petrocelli
- Dec 8, 2016
- 2 min read
I have found the following tools essential to building a foundation of support for students with Dyslexia. It is truly amazing to see the change in confidence and quality of work when the correct supports are put in place for students with print disabilities.
Must see Documentary about Dyslexia
Text to Speech & Speech to Text Options
Technological improvements for Dictation and Digital readback have made huge gains in the last five years. Here are a few options but please note that this technology can be found on most devices and laptops as well as cloud based accessible options.
iOS Text to Speech:
If you go into Settings > Accessibility > Speak Selection section on your iOS device you can turn on Speak Selection. Anytime you highlight words on your iOS device you can select “speak” and it will read the words for you. Here is how:
iOS Dictation
Anywhere you can use your keyboard you can turn your typing into speech to text. It is better for students to be in a quiet space where there is less environmental noise and won't distract others.
Google Docs built in Speech to Text
Read and Write for Google also has a variety of tools including dictation and read back. Check out more about this tool in a previous blog post: Read and Write for google: Increasing accessibility within the Chrome Environment.
What to do when you have a paper heavy teacher?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a really cool Technology that scans a photo of a printed document to decode the words in order to digitize the text which then allows your device to read the printed text to you. There are many apps that have OCR technology but I have found Prizmo to work the best. When a teacher hands them a text heavy sheet of paper to read, they scan it into Prizmo with their iOS device and have it read to them. The technology is not 100% accurate but after a few trials and figuring out how to take the clearest pictures I’d say it works about 85% of the time. Here’s how it works:
Snaptype App: Take a picture from your iOS device and type or dictate within the document. Here is how:
Audiobooks
For someone with Dyslexia audiobooks are equivalent to providing a paraplegic a wheelchair. It is important that it doesn't replace learning strategies to read text but should be available when learning content or encouraging reading for pleasure. See my blog post: Creating Easy Access to Audiobooks.
Web Browsing Specific to Dyslexia
A Few Organizational Tools
Mind mapping is a great way to visually organize ideas. Simple Mind is a great tool for this. For younger students check out Popplet or Kidspiration. All come in iOS apps but there are multiple ways to access these tools.
The True Gifts of A Dyslexic Mind
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