LD Resources

Nuance buys up MacSpeech

This is interesting news, speech to text is useful for many people including people with various kinds of disabilities.

Chemical Exposure Linked to Attention Deficit Disorder in Children

Children exposed in the womb to chemicals in cosmetics and fragrances are more likely to develop behavioral problems commonly found in children with attention deficit disorders, according to a study of New York City school-age children published Thursday.

[via Alex Forbes]

Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Newton vs. Graffiti vs. Treo vs. iPhone

This is a great review. It’s not a scientific test but it explores these different methods of getting text into a device in a way that will help anyone think about the future of text encoding on a variety of devices in a broader way.

The only thing missing is voice recognition. The iPhone now has Dragon Naturally Speaking although one has to be connected as the processing is not done locally.

[via Daring Fireball]

Intel Reader Offers High Tech Help For Dyslexics and Visually Impaired

Intel’s Reader, developed by a dyslexic Stanford graduate, is a powerful device for dyslexic and visually impaired readers, allowing them to scan entire pages of text to audio for immediate playback or later review.

This looks quite interesting. If anyone reading this has used one or is considering one I’d like to hear from you.

[via Edward McKeown]

Ten words you need to stop misspelling

The Oatmeal has a way with words, and diagrams. You can buy posters of this page here.

Washington Reads

Card games that engage students in play that strategically builds reading skills.

I have two friends who teach reading who use these materials and like them. That means a lot. Recommended.

Dragon Dictation is a free iPhone application allows you to speak into the iPhone and have the audio turned into text.

Here’s a link to Dragon Dictation at the iTunes Music Store.

Reading in the Brain, The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

Book review by Susan Okie for The Washington Post:

About 5,000 years ago, societies in ancient Sumeria, China and South America invented writing, and in the millennia since, the ability to read has propelled human intellectual and cultural development, vastly expanding our capacity to learn, create, explore and record what we think, feel and know. Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species’s past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us “to listen to the dead with our eyes.”

About the author:

Stanislas Dehaene is a French psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He is currently heading the Cognitive NeuroImaging Unit within the NeuroSpin building of the Commissariat A l’Energie Atomique in Saclay near Paris, France’s most advanced brain imaging center. He is also a professor at College de France in Paris, where he holds the newly created chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. In 2005, he was elected as the youngest member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Reading in the Brain at Amazon

[via Sanford Shapiro]

Camphill Special School
1784 Fairview Road
Glenmoore, PA 19343
610-469-9236
www.camphillspecialschool.org/

Free Speech (Recognition)

David Pogue on the new Dragon Dictation for iPhone, a free, speech to text application that, according to Pogue, works well. Read his review for his discussion of the privacy issues and more.