Today, new technologies are supporting professionals in helping and compensating for learning disorders. One example is the TextVision app, which helps DYS children – particularly those with dyslexia and dysorthographia – with reading. Here’s an overview of this tool, available for €2.50 a month.
The origins of this reading aid
Chouaïb Laghlam is both a digital developer and a university computer science lecturer. As his grandson has a reading-related learning disorder, he came up with an app to help him.
To develop this tool, Chouaïb Laghlam worked closely with occupational therapists, to understand the blocks caused by dyslexia and better address them. On Android smartphones and tablets, the app works like a pocket scanner: it aims to make it easier to recognise printed text (paper documents, books, magazines, newspapers) using adapted fonts.
The goal is to give DYS children a tool within reach, to scan text anywhere, in any setting, and get an instant reading of it via Google’s voice.
How does TextVision work?
With TextVision, children with dyslexia or dysorthographia can take a photo of a text to read it more easily, listen to a scanned text, and reformat the text to decode it more easily. In practice, once the text is photographed, the tool applies OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processing to extract the text.
TextVision then offers a few adjustments: highlighting punctuation, alternating coloured lines or words, colour-coding numbers in blue, increasing text size, and so on. You can also set the font: OpenDyslexic, Andika, Arial, Century Gothic, Sasson, Comic Sans MS, etc.
For voice reading, you can listen to the text continuously or word by word and adjust the reading speed.
Why is the app paid?
The OCR system built into TextVision is a paid service: the developer has to pay for every use. Even though free software exists today, a paid system offers a more complete and reliable transcription of texts.
But this paid approach also guarantees greater security for the information passing through the app. That’s why this tool is popular not just with DYS children, but also with students and dyslexic adults who use it potentially every day, including at work.
Today, the TextVision app is free for the first 10 scans. After that, it costs €2.50 a month to keep using it.
It can be downloaded from Google Play: on its page, you’ll see it has received glowing reviews, with an overall rating of 4.5/5. Even better, this app has been recognised as an ICT teaching tool by the French Ministry of Education. So, had you heard of it?
