Assistive Technologies: Writing Software for Supporting People with Dysgraphia
By Paul Graham
Editorial Note
This is the beginnings of an article on the topic. While it isn’t complete, I thought I would publish it early so others could see some of the information as early as possible.
What is Dysgraphia?
Dysgraphia is a condition that causes people to have problems with writing, in terms of handwriting, getting thoughts down on paper, and other challenges.
Useful Writing Software for Supporting People with Dysgraphia
As I described in a previous blog post, my wife and I have been looking for software that might help our son with expressing himself with the written word and mathematical expressions. This particular blog post is going to summarize our experience with a few software packages that can help people express themselves linguistically.
Dictation
Writing Assistance software
- Draft:Builder: Looks like a promising tool for helping students brainstorm, organize their thoughts, and them build them into a draft of a paper. Looks like the software isn’t in active development, but the approach is interesting.
- Docear: a free software suite that can be used to brainstorm, organize thoughts, and build them into a draft. It has some very nice features for organizing PDF files as well as extracting any notes or annotations on those PDF files.
- Freeplane: a mind-mapping tool for organizing thoughts and ideas. It seemed to be fairly easy to use and is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, and other OSes that can run Java applications). I found it easier to use than Freemind, the software it was derived from.