I was talking with a group of parents of children with learning differences the other night… you can learn some good stuff when you stop being the “expert” and listen!

People were sharing some of the things they had found that helped their dyslexic and asperger children be successful in school. One is bookshare.org a service that “provides print disabled people in the United States with legal access to over 37,550 books and 150 periodicals that are converted to Braille, large print or digital formats for text to speech audio.” And it is FREE to U.S. schools and qualifying U.S. students of all ages including K-12, post-secondary and adult education. It is another option in addition to the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic.

Another service they are using is Spoken Text which takes PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, ,RSS news feeds, emails and web pages, and converts them to speech automatically. This is being used to convert course notes and other classroom materials into speech.