Sidewalk Curb-Cut

In the mid-1970’s, curb-cuts started appearing on sidewalks in major cities. The idea was to make life a little easier for those traveling by wheelchair.  By 1990, the American’s with Disabilities act (ADA), requires that curb cuts be present on all sidewalks.  A curb cut is that area on the corner of your street where the sidewalk dips down to street level. Wheelchairs can more easily travel from sidewalk to street and back up to sidewalk.

Over the years, these curb-cuts have not only helped those using wheelchairs, but anyone who has ever pushed a stroller, a shopping cart, rollerbladed, biked, or somehow rolled along the sidewalk knows the convenience of not having to stop and figure out a way to get down off the curb onto the street and back up again. Though originally meant for people with disabilities, curb cuts have become beneficial to everyone who uses our public sidewalks and streets.

The curb-cut phenomenon refers to any technology originally intended for one particular group of users but ends up benefitting everyone. Voice recognition technology is another example of this. Orginally developed for those unable to use their arms and/or hands, this technology can be found in everything from cell phones to voice-responsive directory assistance.

Assistive technology programs such as those that speak a student textbook or reacts to a student’s voice and types a book report for them are becoming tools for students who aren’t dyslexic, dysgraphic or otherwise challenged. Students and those in the workplace are discovering that these programs are making life easier for everyone.

A college student with an overload of reading assignments can easily find many of their texts in digital format and use a reading program to listen to a text while they take notes.  When it comes time to type a term paper, using a voice recognition program allows a student to speak their thoughts while the computer types their words directly into a word processing program.

Headset with Microphone

In an age of typing, texting, emails and digital documents, keyboarding skills (also known as typing to those of us old enough to remember typewriters) are more crucial than ever. So, what do you do when your child has keyboarding difficulties due to a learning disability, developmental issues or a physical challenge?

There are a number of excellent Speech-to-Text programs available at reasonable cost. With a little training, the user puts on a headset with a mic and speaks whatever it is they want written down. The program recognizes what it is the user is trying to say and types it on the page. A student can play back their own writing and listen to what they have written. In addition to typing words, a Speech-to-Text program will also navigate the page with commands like ‘goto’, ‘next line’, ‘close program’, etc.

These type of programs do require the user to do some ‘training’ to teach the program to recognize their voice. Most training has the user reading a brief passage while the computer processes the voice. The more training you do with a program, the more accurate the recognition process becomes.

A number of excellent programs are currently available for both Macs and Windows-based operating systems:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

Dragon NaturallySpeaking

MacSpeech Dictate Think it. Speak it. Create it. MacSpeech is Desktop Speech Recognition for Macintosh Users Dictate and edit in virtually any Windows application, including Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and AOL Easily create and edit documents and spreadsheets, compose emails and instant messages, or surf the Web just by speaking Quick Voice Formatting commands allow users to issue a single voice command to make deleting and formatting text faster than ever

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, “What’s the goal here?” Is the goal to get your child to actually read the words on the page or is it for your child to obtain the new information? Obtaining new information is basically the whole purpose for reading, isn’t it?

Programs that translate the written word into the spoken word are a great tool for the student who finds reading difficult. With an inexpensive scanner, like this CanonColor Image Scanner, textbooks, worksheets and tests can be scanned as .Pdf files and read back using a program like TextAloud .

Text Aloud will read your child’s schoolwork as well as read back anything typed into the program. Some of the program’s features include: