I’m dyslexic and people keep saying I should use technology – where do I start?

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 19th May, 2023

Category Dyslexia Assistive Technology

There are so many tools and apps available for supporting learners with dyslexia that it can be difficult to know where to begin. This blog introduces a new Technology Checklist which matches additional support needs with tools and strategies that might help.

Technology can help learners with dyslexia in many ways: you can make text easier to read by choosing a more readable font, increasing line spacing, changing colours and using text-to-speech to read documents. You can organise life with digital calendars, reminders and to-do lists. You can write by dictating or if you type, use autocorrect or a talking spellchecker to fix any misteaks.

But there’s a lot of different products and tools, and a load of information on the CALL web site and the internet, and people have said it can be confusing to know where to start. Do I use Immersive Reader? What about Clicker? Read&Write? How can they help me?

We always start with thinking about what we want to do to overcome difficulties and so I’ve taken the Pupil Checklist for Dyslexia from the Addressing Dyslexia Toolkit which has a list of additional support needs.

For each challenge or difficulty in the list, I suggest a strategy that you might learn and some tools to use. 

It’s a pretty simple idea, but that’s the point – we want to make it as simple and straightforward as possible.

For example, 

I've chosen tools that are mostly freely available or can be accessed via your Glow log-in, so everyone in a Scottish state school should be able to access them. They may or may not be the best tools to meet your own needs but we hope that this will help you to at least get started with technology to do things that you might currently find hard.

This version is for learners who use laptops and devices running Windows: we are developing versions for iPads and Chromebooks too.

This is the first version of the tool and if you have comments or suggestions about how it could be improved, please do let me know by emailing Paul.Nisbet@ed.ac.uk. 

If people think it’s useful we have in mind to make it prettier and add more advice and links to how-to videos so that people can find out how to use the tools. 

You can download the checklist from Technology Checklist for learners with dyslexia – Windows.