Classrooms of the 21st century have been moving towards inclusive education where students with disabilities are taught in general education classrooms. This system of inclusion has been proven to provide a significantly improved educational experience for students with disabilities and has positive effects on other students as well. Yet, to provide an effective and appropriate education for students with disabilities in general education classes, support in the form of assistive technology must be provided to the student to assist their learning and comprehension. While assistant technology has a very wide range of supports, today I will be focusing on accessibility tools and programs that students use with a computer. Here are 7 amazing Tools I found and how they can assist students.

Immersive Reader

Immersive Reader is a program that is part of many different Microsoft products. It allows viewers to edit and format documents and words to make them easier to read and decode.

Dragon Dictation

Dragon Dictation is a speech-to-text software program that allows users to create, edit, and format documents by speaking or giving vocal commands. 

Natural Reader text-to-speech

Natural Reader text-to-speech is like the previous program yet flipped around. It converts Word, pdf, and even e-books into an audio-spoken format for students to listen to.

JAWS

JAWS is a computer screen reader designed to assist users with vision loss to read through and navigate websites by converting information on the screen into brail or spoken words.

Sonocent

Sonocent is an audio notetaking program that helps assist students with poor Note-taking skills. It captures audio, text, and slides from class and compiles all of the info into one location that can be easily organized.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk is a time management program that lets students create and organize a list of priorities and assignments due dates which then sends reminders to the students.

Ideament

Ideament is a program that allows students to draw diagrams such as mind maps, concept maps, or flow charts and then convert them into a text outline or written format.

Tools for you

I hope this short list helps give people some ideas on what types of programs exist and their functionality. Many more programs like these exist so it can sometimes be difficult finding the best ones so it is always best to try a few accessibility tools before picking the one you’d like to stick with. Not only can these tools be implemented in any future classroom but some of these tools are available to us as students through Stockton. So if you feel like one of the mentioned accessibilities tools can help you achieve more as a student, try looking on the Stockton website to see if the tool is supported and available.

Remember to check out my other blog posts for more information on educational topics.