There are many different types of Assistive technologies that can be used by people with disabilities of many kinds. There are technologies for the blind and the physically disabled. I will touch on both of these in this blog post. I use assistive technologies to help me type sometimes when i am blogging, I will mention ones that already exist within the operating system as well as some paid versions of different assistive technologies that exist.
the most popular assistive technology that is used for typing is Dragon Naturally Speaking, they have since dropped the NaturallySpeaking part of the program and it is now called Dragon Professional, they do have a cheaper version which has the NaturallySpeaking in the name but i have opted for the Professional version. You can buy Dragon by going to Nuance.com and selecting Dragon on their website, you may also be able to find Dragon cheaper other places such as Amazon, but since Nuance is the manufacturer of Dragon i would suggest that you buy it from a reliable source. I have never had any issues with the software itself, i have been using it since Windows 7. There are dictation features built into windows, as well as Mac, but in my opinion those aren’t as good as Dragon in regards to features.
There are also screen readers which will read what is on your screen, the most popular one that people use is JAWS Screen Reader, according to WebAIM it was the most popular screen reader used worldwide. If you are a Mac user, the only option you have is VoiceOver which is built into the mac operating system.
For other operating systems such as Linux there are free screen readers that can be used.
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