As this week has been Dyslexia Awareness week in the UK I thought I would give a plug for a surprising device . It is the Chromebook. At first I thought this would be a limited use device due to its small memory and needing wifi to be useful. Both of that is true but you can extend your memory with an SD card and you can download work to be used offline( you can login to the chromebook on startup)
Then if you go to Accessibility>Enable Onscreen keyboard. Instructions as follows. You can then write into any and every application using your voice. It’s truly ingenious and functional. Of course what I am just saying will need wifi to be useful as the speech interpretation is being done online but it doesn’t require any training to perfect the tool and is available at no extra cost on your £168 Chromebook or similar priced Chromebook.
95% of what follows was written with my voice and with no training. Keystrokes were needed to be functionally useful with certain actions like a new line or paragraph but that is all! This is what a dyslexic user might find useful as it also works on any Android device.
To write with your voice on a Chromebook
- Enable the on-screen keyboard in Settings – Accessibility- Enable on-screen keyboard
- You will see that there is a microphone on the keyboard
- You will be able to input textBy clicking on the iconAnd then speaking your words and sentence
And audio beep occurs when the speech is ready to receive text.
You’re not stopped from using the normal keyboard
Fact this is a preferred way of making your text more accessible by using both the speech microphone and the keyboard in a combo fashion.
There is no need to train
Google accepts your speech
As long as you’re connected to the Wi-Fi
And have Internet access
The onscreen keyboard can pop up with pop down as required
AccessAbility Solutions 