Assistive Technology For Reading

In my last blog post, I talked about writing disabilities. When a child has a writing disability, even going through the writing process (prewriting, drafting, reviewing, editing, sharing) can be an extremely difficult task. To make writing easier for these students I talked about different assistive technology devices that would help them through each step of the writing process! In this blog post, I am going to be talking about students who have a reading disability. Just like with writing, when a student has a reading disability they will try to avoid reading activities at all cost. To help these students feel less anxiety about reading activities and to help them succeed in reading, I am going to talk about different assistive technology devices to help students with reading disabilities!

The purpose of this blog post is to help educators and parents understand different assistive technology devices that they could consider using to help a child in their life that has a reading disability. Reading is a life-long skill that students need to be able to do on their own and feel confident doing so, with the help of the following assistive technology devices, a child can finally feel confident when given a reading assignment and could complete the assignment independently!

POPULAR ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY DEVICES FOR READING DISABILITIES:

1) Text Reader: 

WHAT: A software program that reads all the text in any given document or application.

INCLUDES: Reading the web, study tools and supports for writing.

USED FOR: Students with a reading disability, but with adequate vision.

                             

                                   (Golden,S.)

2) Screen Reader:

Screen Magnification Feature

WHAT: Reads ALL the text elements on the screen, including; menu bars, buttons and dialogue boxes.

INCLUDES: Screen magnification features.

USED FOR: Students with visual impairments or reading disabilities.

                       (Golden,S.)

3) Text-To-Speech:

Text-To-Speech software includes the following features to support reading:

• Choice of high-quality voices.
• Modify text interface (how the program reads, or chunks, the text). 
• Text-To-Speech software can speak by letter, word, speak by sentence, or the program can be set to speak only after a complete paragraph.
• Ability to control rate (speed up or slow down the speech).
• Recursive, web-based or built-in dictionary.



Text-To-Speech Highlight Feature

• Built-in are "finite but typically easier to understand" (Golden,S.).
• Web-based are "essentially infinite but may contain difficult language" (Golden,S.).
• Recursive allows "users to look up words provided in the definition" (Golden,S.).
• Highlight and extract key information.
• "User can select key words or phrases and move them to a different part of the screen or a different document" (Golden,S.).  
• Ability to insert, create or modify scaffold for reading.
• "Allows the user or the teacher to guide the reader to relevant or required information within the text" (Golden,S.). 
• Can read files directly from bookshare.org.
• Can OCR (Optical Character Recognition) documents.
• Transforms a picture or text to readable text.
• Consistent format for Internet and other reading.
• Converts to MP3.
• Includes language translator.
• (Golden,S.)

Where To Get Electronic Text?:

www.bookshare.org 

To watch a video about how to find a specific book on bookshare.org, click the link!!!

This blog post relates directly to the classroom. As educators, we come across students with reading disabilities fairly often. My blog post provides educators with some assistive technology devices that are being used to help students with reading disabilities and a brief description of what the devices are and how they can help the student! Of coarse, before deciding to use any of the above assistive technology devices, an IEP team should discuss whether assistive technology is necessary and whether any of the devices would be appropriate to help the child succeed in the classroom! Reading is a valuable, life-long skill! Educators should work overtime to make this skill as easy and stress-free for their students as possible! 

Golden, S. Assistive Technology for Reading. Retrieved from: http://www.gatfl.gatech.edu/tflwiki/images/6/6d/CREATE_webinar_-_AT_for_Reading_Feb_21_2013.pdf.