Learning Disability – Assistive Technology Tools for Success

To follow up with the issues students with learning disabilities have to overcome, here are some free and/or open source solutions.

Of course this assumes that there is a PC, laptop or netbook available for use.

For reading (a major issue for students with learning disability), a good all around program which can open text and Word document files but also ePub files, Balabolka. Balabolka has text to speech capabilities and can save the file to a variety of audio formats with a few clicks.

For accessible eBooks, the old reliable, Project Gutenberg with over 36,000 books out of copyright and in the public domain. Project Gutenberg has expanded it's offerings to a variety of formats, including ePub, Kindle, Plucker and text. In some cases, there are also audio files, some of which are computer generated and some have recorded.

For writing,consider an alternative to MS Office – OpenOffice.org. Openoffice.org is a full featured office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, drawing program, equation editor and a database program. All in all, almost the equivalent of MS Office Professional. The word processor is full featured and has add-ins for Zotero and a text-to-speech program (Read Text)

For mindmapping, XMind is a free open source organizational program.

For time and task management, Chandler is an open source program for adding tasks, appointments and alarms.

For more information and links, check out NPTraining.net.