Free Assistive Tech Tools Make Learning Accessible to All

Technology provides a terrific way to remove the obstacles to learning.  Fortunately, many of the tools available are free but what are they?  I reached out to my PLN through Facebook, Twitter, Classroom 2.0 and Google+ to find out.  Here are the fabulous resources shared by my PLN. 

Assistive Tech Starter Kit
The following accessibility tools are recommended to get started with assistive technology.

• Google Apps Accessibility
• accessibility features of our products for vision & hearing impaired.
• Accessibility on the PCs with MS Office
• WordTalk,  Balaboka, or Windows Speech Recognition
• Accessibility with mobiles
• VLingo (Android - free, BlackBerry - cheap)
• Dragon (iOS - free) on handhelds or tablets.
• FireFox with Accessibility A collection of free accessibility add-ons available from Firefox. FoxVox and CLiCk-Speak are great.

These are all free (or cheap) and provide both effective Text-To-Speech (thus access to content) and those with Word-by-Word highlighting help build sight-word recognition. One of the best uses of text to speech is to support writing with "read back" editing.

Resource courtesy of Ira Socol 

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