Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Assistive Technology for Reading

Just as I did in my last entry, I am going to review another website in this post.  I read through this webinar on Assistive Technology for Reading.

This webinar mentioned some assistive technology options that I have already researched in previous posts, such as text reader software and eBooks.  Screen reader was new to me, as it can read all elements on the screen; this includes the menu bar, buttons, and dialogue boxes.

These software options offer many approaches to reach students:

  • Choices of high quality voices
  • Modify text interface (how the program chunks or reads the text; letter by letter, word by word, sentence, or paragraph)
  • Control the rate of reading
  • Can highlight key information
  • Options for scaffolding reading
  • Can OCR documents (*OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition which transforms pictures or text to readable text)
  • Includes language translator
  • Can convert to MP3


The webinar ended with the phrase "Assistive Technology for Reading... The choice is yours!" and I really think that sums it up nicely.  There are so many options out there (again, from low-tech to high-tech... along that AT continuum). This is a great resource that highlighted many great options for assistive technology for reading.


References:  AT for Reading Webinar

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