Natural Reader has been a great help for my son. Not all of our programs have complete audio. It allows him to be able to get that audio component as he follows along with any text just by highlighting the words. You can download the free version at www.naturalreaders.com or pay for a personal or professional version.

My son uses a lap top to help organize his calendar, maintain his assignments, complete most written work. Many of his assignments are loaded on the school or teacher web site, and he can use the text to voice feature to read articles and work sheets.

Since he is extremely dysgraphic and dyslexic this has helped him immensely. Using a key board is still difficult - fine motor challenges rear their head on a key board just as they do with a pencil. But, overall, the key board is easier (doesn't have to visual the shape of each letter) and the output can be read and edited much easier than his pen and paper scribble.

Additionally, he is learning the editing features such as copy and paste, so that he can spell key and frequent words correctly. Spell check is a mixed bag - his spelling and reading skills are so low that often it does not give him the correct choice and if it does, he cannot easily discern between the choices. He uses the speech feature to "hear" the choices and this helps quite a bit.

This year his school has introduced Kurzwiel. By using such technology, he can access reading material at his cognitive level. His school has placed him in the highest literacy group - even though he has very low reading skills, because with technology, he can access great literature, use his excellent listening comprehension, thinking skills and verbal skills to participate in the lively discussion.

He does use a caculator and it helps a bit - his recall of math facts is very slow and inaccurate. But, he needs to practice with it more so that it becomes more automatic and fluid. It is not a tool that he relies on - even if he would benefit from it!

My son is in his late teens, and unfortunately, AT hasn't been much help. Maybe there has been significant improvements in what's available, but we spent several hours over several weeks time when he was in his early teens, trying to train voice recognition software to recognize his speech, and it was a huge disappointment. After contacting the vendor, they acknowledged that most of the software is simply not designed for children's voices, and because we had attempted to do this before he hit puberty, we'd probably find that it would have to be "trained and retrained" as he entered adulthood. There were concerns about whether he was using a good quality microphone in a quiet area (which we were doing at home,) but how many kids can be expected to use such software to prepare papers or reports at school? You can't sit talking in the back of a classroom, while everyone else is silent, but if they're noisy, too, then the microphone would pick up that interference. We gave up trying, and he learned to improve his keyboarding skills, but another reason we were trying the voice software is because his thought process is more "fluid" when spoken, whereas when he tries to handwrite or type, it takes him a lot of time to think of how to spell words (and they're often incorrect) and so the words he uses when he writes are more simplistic than if he speaks.

(I should also add that a big problem in kids using AT, especially in Middle School and High school, is the embarassment factor. If a child is in "mainstream" classes, but they're carrying around a laptop or some other device when none of the other students are, they often don't want to use it to be seen as "different.") My son is now in college, and many kids carry computers, so embarassment is no longer a big deal, but then he runs into a different situation, where some teachers insist on seeing handwritten lab notes in a particular format in a special notebook, and so he can't keyboard them, anyway!

I have found that an FM System has been very helpful to my daughter. She now comprehends a significant amount of sounds/words that she has been missing. It is easier for her to hear and understand verbal instructions by the teacher.

I'm a Resource Specialist and have used The Writer Fusion with students in the Learning Center. It is similar to an Alpha Smart, but comes with all of the options standard, a larger screen, built-in writing prompts (or I can add one that relates to class work) that can be evaluated 1-4 with constructive feedback, so the student can improve it prior to handing it in. There is a program of typing instruction, word prediction, and text-to-speech. I would add weekly vocab, which placed the word as a priority in the word prediction. The text-to-speech enables student to determine choose correct word choice from spell check, and hear the sentence read back to see if it makes sense. I found that the students generated more content, were less stressed, and more motivated. The audio feedback seems to be the key.

My son used the writer in 4th and 5th grade. We found that the typing program was very good for him - better than type to learn and others because the teacher could adust the time constraints and there were not a lot of distractions. It was a good tool to get him ready for the lap top.