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I am a successful dyslexic adult and part of the reason for my success is the fact that I use computers and other tools to organize my life and express my ideas. I am extremely opinionated. My strong feelings come from personal experience and the experience of thousands of people who I have helped get started with computers. The fact that I recommend certain computers, software, and other tools does not mean that they are endorsed by The Orton Dyslexia Society.
We are interested in investing in computer equipment for our ten year old dyslexic child. We are looking at a scanner to enlarge print, and also to be able to have the material read back to him. We are also trying to make a decision on what choices of computer hardware and software would be available. It would be both user friendly and have software to aid dyslexic skill building and/or for regular academic reinforcement. Where can I get information on these specific concerns?
When you’re making a decision about what kind of personal computer to buy these days there are really two choices: DOS or Windows machines (IBMs or compatible) or Macintoshes. People who use Windows will disagree with this, but, in my opinion and in the opinion of thousands of other dyslexic computer users, the Macintosh is the easiest, most consistent, best integrated, and most enjoyable machine to use. In my experience, more dyslexic people (kids and adults) use the Macintosh than any other kind of machine. With a Macintosh, the machine falls into the background faster than with a Windows-based machine. This is important because you don’t want to spend your time learning about the computer; you want to spend your time using the computer as a tool for exploring content or making your own content.
Once you decide between Windows and Macintosh then you have to decide between desktop machine and portable/notebook. For doing the things a ten year old is going to do with computers, a desktop machine will be better. In the Macintosh world all desktop machines are now color machines and many models can be bought with CD ROM drives built in (CD ROMs are a medium for distributing software, usually with lots of images and sound).
For a high school or college student I might recommend a portable computer (in the Macintosh world these are called PowerBooks) so that he might carry the computer to the library to avoid having to transcribe from a notebook into the computer.
Another variable for parents is the question of buying the kind of computer a child uses at school. My simple answer is, it doesn’t matter whether you have the same machine the school uses or not because you probably won’t be running the same kind of software the school uses anyway. And, the kinds of things your child or you will do with a computer at school will be different from the kinds of things he or you will do with it at home. Why be stuck with whatever the school has decided is best? The bottom line is that kids, even dyslexic kids, can adapt to various kinds of computers much more easily than adults (so stop projecting your uneasiness about computers onto your kids!).
Any Macintosh computer that has ever been, and probably ever will be, can display text in a variety of typefaces, sizes, and styles. The size of type is only one of many variables that can effect readability. The typeface used is also an important consideration. Macintoshes come with many built-in typefaces and you can purchase hundreds more. Any Macintosh typeface can be displayed on screen and on paper in a wide range of sizes to make reading easier.
Possibly a more important consideration in readability is not the physical medium, but the quality of the writing itself; the quality of the author’s thinking and his or her ability to illustrate that thinking with words. That’s another story (and column).
Before a computer can read text aloud the text has to be in the machine. Either the user has to write the text or have written the text, or somebody else has to write the text, or have written the text.
Even considering what will eventually happen with speech (see below), learning the keyboard is an important part of the writing process. It is not, however, an important part of using a computer, just the writing process. For this reason, there is little reason to learn to touch type until one wants to write faster. Yes, I know how to touch type and I’m glad I know. But, I learned only after being motivated by wanting to write faster, not because I was told that it was an essential ingredient for computer literacy, which it is not.
The positive part of keyboarding as many dyslexics already know is that it does not tap our weaknesses; it is purely the memory of kinesthetic sequences which have little to do with auditory or visual memory. For that reason and the fact that I can look at the screen while I type, learning to keyboard has improved my spelling and my writing as well.
In the end, my advice is to let the need to learn to keyboard invent itself and when it does, be ready with one of the many excellent electronic keyboarding programs.
There is another option and that is speech. The original question didn’t mention speech and I’m not going to go into it now except to say that there is technology available, both on the Macintosh and in the Windows world for doing speech-to-text (you talk into a microphone and the computer displays your speech as text). The Windows product is called Dragon Dictate and the Macintosh product is called Power Secretary. There are limitations to both products and they are both extremely expensive. But what was expensive in the past is inexpensive now so it’s important to track this technology because eventually it will compete with, if not replace, the standard keyboard.
One way to get text into a computer is to take a page of written text, say a textbook page, lay it on a scanner, and make a digital picture of the page in the computer. This is referred to as scanning. The problem with scanning alone is that the image the computer has is just a picture of text, it isn’t the real text that can be edited and read aloud. In order to turn the picture of text into text that can be read aloud, a special piece of software called optical character recognition software (OCR) must be used. This software looks at a scanned image of text and translates the image into text characters. Just to be clear, OCR software does the scanning too. All a user does is place a book on a scanner and run the software, it does the rest.
There are a number of ways of doing OCR. One way is with a hand-held scanner that the user drags over a page. Another way is with a flatbed scanner (looks like a photocopy machine) that the user places a book on face down.
Also note that many OCR packages have certain scanner and computer requirements. If you know that OCR is going to be an important use of your machine, make your shopping list accordingly.
A final note: I do not own OCR software, although I have a scanner which I use to scan artwork rather than text. I can read. I read slowly, but fast enough so that this technology would get in my way. I’m assuming that most dyslexics might have limited use for this kind of technology in the early parts of their reading careers, but after a while their reading will improve to the point that going through this process will seem more cumbersome than just sitting down and reading the material.
There are also other options for getting text into your computer. Books that are out of copyright can be legally scanned or keyboarded into computers. This includes much of the literature that is studied in many high school curriculums. For instance, the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe are available on many online services for users to take, for free. And, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of other electronic texts available, as well as electronic versions of Barron’s Book Notes and other study aids. Of course, once you have the electronic text on your machine, you can enlarge its type or have the machine read it to you.
The easiest way to have access to this wealth of electronic information is to join a commercial online service. And, the easiest-to-use and cheapest online service is America Online (AOL). AOL is available on both Windows machines and Macintoshes and provides numerous resources for both kids and adults with dyslexia: electronic mail, a learning disabilities forum for questions, answers, talk with other people with learning problems, access to hundreds of electronic books and other useful software, and more. A modem is required for access to any online services.
There are two ways of storing and retrieving audible text on a computer. You can read some text into a microphone and record it such that the computer will play it back like a tape recorder. This is called digitized sound. Just like an audio compact disc (CD), the content sounds very good. Most multi-media products that have fixed content use digitized sound.
The problem with digitized sound is that it is not interactive: it can’t read (play) what you type on the screen because that content wasn’t fixed ahead of time. Theoretically, I could digitize every word I might type, but what would happen when I made a spelling mistake? Would the computer read back the word spelled correctly? How could it?
To have text read aloud interactively: what you type is what you hear, a speech synthesizer is used. This technology is sometimes called "text-to-speech." Text-to-speech technology is software that you install on your computer. The quality of the sound this technology makes is inferior to the quality of digitized sound, but the fact that it is completely interactive makes up for the drop in sound quality. With this technology you can have any text read back to you, text that you write or text that someone else has written.
You should note that for teaching basic vowel sounds to dyslexics with weak auditory discrimination, text-to-speech technology leave much to be desired, but you probably would use a program with digitized speech for this purpose anyway and leave the synthesized speech for use when kids are doing more writing and need more interaction.
Any current Macintosh computer is capable of doing text to speech synthesis and this capability is built into many products.
