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When typing isn’t an option

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

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