Azu Ike

I guess patience is a real virtue especially when it comes to developing apps for Apple's IOS devices. In the case of the Co:Writer App for IOS from Don Johnston, Inc , the wait was certainly worth it.  Co:Writer for Mac and PC has become to large degree the standard in the assistive technology field for word prediction. I can remember when I first saw Co:Writer for the first time I was floored just how good the prediction algorithms were. It had the uncanny ability to feel like it was reading my Co:Writer for IOS comes complete with a large library of built-in Topic Dictionaries, what happens when the student is writing for example a current events paper on the Civil War in Syria? Not a problem, Co:Writer for IOS can go out to the web and create a Scraped Topic Dictionary on the fly. Wow that is some powerful feature! Co:Writer for iPad mind as I demonstrated it on the computer. But what could we come to expect from Co:Writer on an IOS device? With a long history of being the ...

Snap&Read Reading Interface I have had a chance this week to test out Snap&Read from Don Johnston, Inc which is a clever reading utility for Windows and Mac users. Snap&Read floats on top of your existing applications and when you need it to read some text you simply click on and drag a rectangular region around the text that you want to read and voila the text is instantly read, complete with highlighting. Snap&Read uses the high quality Acapela speech engine and by going into the Settings you can easily slow down or increase the reading speed. Users can select from Ryan or Heather to read the text. The beauty of Snap&Read is that it can read text in Microsoft Word, PDF's, as well as Flash based websites which gives the user a simple and elegant way to read text. Snap&Read is available for $79 dollars and is available for Windows and Macintosh. Snap&Read can also be run directly from a USB drive giving students access to accessible text wherever they ...