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Talking Dyslexia

Posted by Allan Wilson on the 14th November, 2016

As part of my role as Information Officer, I give occasional talks on the use of technology to support people with dyslexia, to branches of Dyslexia Scotland, parent groups and others.

In the last week of October I spoke with parents from the Glasgow Gaelic School and met with the North East Scotland branch of Dyslexia Scotland at Westhill, just outside Aberdeen.

The meeting at the Gaelic School was particularly useful as it provided an opportunity to demonstrate the use of the Ceitidh Gaelic computer voice with some of the text to speech programs that we recommend for proofreading and reading E-Books and other electronic text from a device. This part of the presentation focused mainly on using a PC with WordTalk, NaturalReader 13 and Balabolka. I had prepared a handout on Using Ceitidh, which described the use of Orato, but it wasn't working properly so I switched to NaturalReader. The talk didn't just focus on the use of Ceitidh, as I also included speech recognition using NaturallySpeaking (now available on a 30-day trial basis) and a look at the built-in features available for the iPad to support people with reading and writing difficulties. In response to questions, I demonstrated a couple of scanning apps, knfbReader and TextGrabber.

Over forty people attended the talk for Dyslexia Scotland's North East Branch. This began with a quick look at T-Bar, a free program that provides a coloured overlay. similar to the reading rulers that many people with visual stress find helpful. I then ran through the usual text to speech programs, along with the Ginger spellchecker and NaturallySpeaking. As most people attending used iPhones or iPads, I again focused on iPads for the second part of the talk, rather than splitting time equally with Android devices. After covering the same territory as earlier in the week, I demonstrated linking the text of a Kindle book, with the equivalent audiobook from Audible through WhisperSync. This is a powerful technique, allowing a poor reader to follow the text on the screen, while hearing a book read out loud by a human voice. A couple of people were already using this combination for reading books.

The programs and apps covered in the talks are briefly described in a handout that I use for these general talks on Mostly Low-Cost / Free Software to Support People with Dyslexia Using PC and iPad / Android Tablet.

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