Within the Assistive Technology sector, there is a wealth of available technologies available that can help students that struggle with reading to access and comprehend text.

On technology platforms such as PCs and tablets, there is an abundance of free and premium solutions that can be used when working with electronic text on emails, websites, documents, and PDFs, many of which are listed on the DSA. But what about when a student needs to comprehend difficult text in a book or magazine?

Accessing printed text with Assistive Technology.

Using software programs and apps to read printed text can be straightforward enough but there are stages that the student has to go through in order to gain access to text:

• Take a picture,

• Import the picture into the software,

• Apply Optical Character Recognition (O.C.R)

• Read out the text.

This process is fine if the student is beside their laptop but it is still a multi-stage process and doesn’t lend itself well to immediacy such as flicking through a book and wanting to read out the text in the moment.

For this purpose, a hardware approach may be more appropriate, and increasingly on the market there is a range of ‘pen-like’ products that scan text and immediately read it out. The actual function is performed differently depending upon the product and different approaches to reading out text will work with different people for different reasons.

So how does the DSA Assessor know what to recommend?

Here at Aventido, we are marketing a product called Orcam Learn DSA, a pen-like device that reads out whole pages of text using cutting-edge laser and AI technology.

It is a great product but we recognise that it won’t be appropriate for everyone and it is important that DSA Assessors recommend it to the students who would get the most benefit from using one.

To ensure that the right students get the right assistive technology recommended to them, in the case of Orcam Learn DSA we have made available the Orcam Learn DSA Recommendation Guide that provides guidance on who would benefit most from using this product.

The Orcam Learn Recommendation Guide will give the DSA Assessor all the information that they need to be able to discern who would benefit most from using this technology. This helps the assessor to compare with other technologies and make a decision for themselves as to what to recommend.