Ghotit has released the Real Writer Pro app, designed by people with dyslexia for people with dyslexia. It features an intelligent, context-sensitive spell checker, an advanced grammar checker, a word prediction tool, a proofreader and other features. For more information, click here.
Google might soon become even more accessible for people with dyslexia. Ray Kurzweil recently announced that he has been hired by Google “to work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing”. Kurzweil is the principal inventor of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition platform.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/14/ray-kurzweil-joins-google-as-engineering-director-focusing-on-machine-learning-and-language-tech/
Former Google V.P. Douglas Merrill was not diagnosed with dyslexia until high school. “Because learning was such a struggle for me, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get around the limitations my learning challenges posed. I worked hard to develop techniques and systems to reduce stress on my brain and help me focus only on the information I really needed to learn. I was hired to help Google in its mission to ‘organize the world’s information’ partly because I’d been practicing to do that very thing since first grade.”
For the full interview, go to: http://dyslexia.yale.edu/PRNT_merrill.html
The Dyslexic Kids Support Group for Kids and Teens with Dyslexia meets this Thursday. For more information, go to: http://dyslexickids.net/_Newsletter_.html
Kindle’s Voice Guide is an improvement upon regular text-to-speech. It reads aloud any action performed by users such as announcing app names and book titles when they are selected. Although it is designed for those with vision challenges, this feature will also be helpful to young students with dyslexia and those with severe dyslexia. Read more about this new assistive technology here.
While talking with the children I tutor and with other children and teens with dyslexia, it has become shockingly clear that almost all children with dyslexia are teased and bullied at some point. What is more shocking to me is the number of children who feel they deserve it or believe that it is normal to be bullied and teased.
These color-coded reminder bracelets for students are an interesting idea. Would they work for students with dyslexia?
Check out this article regarding the effects of positive parenting on children with developmental disabilities (autism, etc.): http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2012/11/16/parenting-style-big-impact/
Do you think positive parenting, or at least a positive attitude, could make a difference to a child with dyslexia? If so, how?
