Digital Textbooksįor students with reading difficulties, accessing curriculum textbooks can be very difficult and time-consuming. There are also lots of OCR apps for tablets and smartphones including App Writer and Textgrabber. Companies which make these pens include Scanning Pens and Wizcom. They also include a dictionary to explain what a word means. These are handheld pens containing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software which enables them to scan and read words and phrases. Reading Pens/Scanning Pensįor those students whose reading is reasonably competent, but where they come across occasional words that they cannot identify, a reading pen can be a good solution. These include such products as ClaroRead and TextHelp Read & Write. However, now this type of functionality is quite mainstream and these stand-alone programmes are often not required and can be very expensive. There are third party software available, that use to dominate the market. The Kindle Fire has an in-built screen reader. Electronic readers such as Kindle, Sony eReader and others have opened up the world of digital books.

PDFs have an in-built screen reader (see Menu/View/Read Out Loud).

WordTalk is a free plug-in for Microsoft Word that reads out text and also has a talking dictionary feature.

Android products: The Speak function is available under Settings/Accessibility.

Speak Select allows a small section of text, or individual words, to be highlighted and then spoken whilst Speak Screen reads the entire screen out.

Apple products: Speak Select or Speak Screen (See Settings/General/Accessibility).Examples of text to speech/screen reading software include: The user just needs to know how to turn it on. But now it is built into most devices (laptops, tablets, phones), apps and websites. Traditionally this type of technology was unreliable and expensive. Individuals words can also be targeted to check the pronunciation and definitions.

Text can be read word-by-word, in sentences or continuous passages. The reading voice and speed can be adjusted. This could be text which the student has just typed, an email, a webpage, a Word/PDF document, or pages of a textbook. This software will read out loud, in a digital voice, any text on the computer screen. Reasonable Accommodations in College and Further Education.Accessing College and Further Education.

Dyslexia speech to text software