After years of trying to navigate the special education system within my son’s school, we decided we needed to get help from a special education advocate. Our advocate helped guide us through obtaining evaluations outside of the school and then getting my son the appropriate services within the school system. With her help, my son has been thriving in school for years. When he began high school, we wanted to ensure he was set up with the services he needed in the new environment. The stakes seemed a bit higher.

One of the things she focused on was ensuring he had access to assistive technology. She asked what kind of text-to-speech and speech-to-text programs he would have access to on his school-issued device. She mentioned the program Natural Reader to help with listening to and revising his writing. She said that students with LD often miss or leave out words in their writing, and it’s helpful to hear it read back to them as part of the editing and revision process.

I said to myself, “I need that too!” I’ve noticed as I write, sometimes I type different words than I intended, or I leave out words. No matter how many times I read through, or even read aloud, I may still miss some of these typos if I’m trying to send out something fast like an email.

So a few years ago, I started using Natural Reader to review almost all of my writing. Better yet, the organization I work for now has a newer version of the Microsoft suite, so I instead use the built in “Read Aloud” function that’s available on the Review tab in Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Word. I love telling my colleagues about this functionality that is right at our fingertips. Give it a try if you haven’t already, and I hope you find it as useful as I do!