Dyslexia & Technology

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Permalink Reply by Steph on January 23, 2008 at 5:43pm

I work with many students with dyslexia and I have found that with strong guidance and some modifications they are able to surf the web with success. If I'm having students do research and look for articles I will often find the articles ahead of time, and modify them in Word to make the text bigger and also edit for difficult vocabulary. I have the students find the actual articles, and then tell them not to print them because I have copies ready for them. This has worked well for me and the students gain a lot of research skills from doing these activities.

Permalink Reply by Becca Berbaum on March 3, 2008 at 8:38pm

Just today I came across a couple great free text-to-speech add-ons for mozilla firefox.:

Fire Vox: designed specifically for individuals who have vision impairments or reading disabilities.

CLiCk Speak: designed specifically for individuals who are not visually impaired but just prefer to listen.

Browser add-on text-to-speech programs are better for web browsing because they are set up to sensibly deal with links, buttons, etc. Using a browser add-on TTS program feels a bit less like freeze-screen reading and is more conducive to interactivity with the web page. These two I listed are both made by the same company, so they have many similar features, but they are both completely free and are full versions.