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.

Needs for Students with Learning Disabilities

Reading Writing and nope, not 'rithmetic, but time management and organization are major obstacles for students with learning disabilities. Fortunately, there are assistive technology tools to assist the learning disabled.

• Fifteen percent of the U.S. population, or one in seven Americans, has some type of learning disability, according to the National Institutes of Health.

• Difficulty with basic reading and language skills are the most common learning disabilities. As many as 80% of students with learning disabilities have reading problems.

Strategies to assist students with learning disabilities can range from the very simple to highly complex solutions. Assistive Technology can range from the simple to complex; free to extremely expensive.

There are assistive technology tools which are free to download as well as simple and easy to install and use. A number of these programs are open source programs, which allows other programmers to modify and extend them if needed.

There are shareware programs available, but often these programs are often limited time trials or have limited functionality encouraging the user to buy the premium version. Many of the open source programs run on operating systems other than Windows, providing even more flexibility. Among the programs are LibreOffice, Xmind, Balabolka and Chandler.

Most of these programs run on Windows and in addition, Microsoft Office and Windows 7 have other assistive technology features and programs. For instance, OneNote is now included in all versions of Office 2010.

The nice thing is new and updated assistive technology tools for people with learning disabilities become available almost daily.

For more information, www.NPTraining.net

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Word Is Broken

Not really, but in one aspect, it might as well be if you’re using Office 2003. Previous versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint could open and work with the newest versions of these programs. You could save a file in Word 2003 and use it in Word 97. With the release of Office 2007, Microsoft broke the compatibility with previous releases. You can’t open Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint files using earlier versions of Office.

Since the only version of Office now available is Office 2007, you’ll begin to notice this problem when you receive Office files you can’t open.

You have three options:

1. Upgrade to Office 2007 – Student Home edition is only $149 retail

2. Ask the person sending you the file to save it in the Office 97 – 2003 format

3. Download the Microsoft Compatibility Pack to allow older versions of Office to work With Office 2007.