For learners with dyslexia, assistive technology can make a world of difference.
Take Ptahra Jeppe, Esq., for example. She may eye-read at a fourth grade level, but assistive technology tools played a key role supporting her throughout college which led to earning a law degree. Today, they make her job as a disability rights lawyer possible.
The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity estimates that 20% of American students have dyslexia. When reading is a struggle, it’s all-too-easy to fall behind peers in school.
Text-to-speech can help a large percentage of students with dyslexia read grade-level content independently. A great starting point is the built-in accessibility features available on most any device.
But those features are often limited in how they can support learners with dyslexia.
Snap&Read provides specialized support for students with dyslexia that goes beyond standard accessibility.
Snap&Read’s portfolio of tools helps students learn to recognize new words, eliminate distractions, do research, organize an essay, and read text in an image or PDF.
Read on to learn how, or see how these tools work.
1. Text-to-speech to read text aloud.
Snap&Read’s text-to-speech tool can help students with dyslexia access grade level content by reading it aloud to them.
This feature works across virtually any device, website, or content.
Students can adjust the read-aloud tool’s voice and speed. A slower pace can be helpful for users who want to sight-read along with the tool.
Each word can be highlighted as it’s read, making tracking easy.
Sight-reading the words as they are highlighted can increase a student’s exposure to unfamiliar and even non-phonetic words.
Over time, this builds word recognition in students with dyslexia.
2. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Tool to read inaccessible text.
Inaccessible text can be embedded in an image, a PDF, a map, an infographic, or a scanned worksheet. Typical text-to-speech tools cannot read this text, but Snap&Read’s OCR tool can—by taking a snapshot of the text and converting it to accessible text with the click of a button.
3. Remove Distractions Tool to eliminate visual noise like advertisements.
Ads on websites are literally designed to catch your attention! It’s no wonder they’re distracting to students with dyslexia; they’re distracting to the best of readers!
Snap&Read has a tool for that—one click and advertisements, video content, or content other than the main article or text, disappears.
What’s left is simple, clean and easy to focus on, without distractions.
Many students with dyslexia find it useful to hone into text one line at a time using color overlays. Doing so can help reduce visual stress.
Snap&Read offers many color options, as well as options to overlay a paragraph, an entire page of text, and/or to highlight lines of text to help focus the reader.
Reading struggles can make it difficult to organize written research, papers, or essays.
Snap&Read’s study tools allow users to highlight text (with attribution!) from multiple sources which automatically drops into a convenient sidebar outline that can be organized and added to. Sources are available in MLA, APA, or Chicago style.
About 60 templated outlines assist learners with dyslexia in organizing their thoughts and notes into formats like the three paragraph essay, KWL, and SQ3R.