After all the fights and advocating and heartache I thought I should share something really positive that our district has been providing. I received this today from the AT specialist they have working with DD9:
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I just wanted to summarize my session with DD yesterday. We compared 3 three different speech recognition engines (Dragon software, iSpeech app, and Dragon app). The Dragon app consistently produced the most accurate translation and DD preferred it. We practiced dictating, copying the text, and pasting it into the CoWriter app to have her listen and edit further with word prediction.
She asked that I email you to download the Dragon app on her home iPad. She shared that she feels the Dragon app is better than Siri.
We also looked into the app VoiceDream to listen to website and other pleasure books. I know there was a previous concern about the quality of the voices, but the recent update provides extremely high quality voices, DD listened with the voice Joey. She listened to a passage and enjoyed it. The app and high quality voice will be downloaded on her school iPad today or tomorrow, there was already approval.
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns! It was a great session yesterday!
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It took a year to get them to agree to do an AT eval and another year to get them to start providing the services but now that all is in place she is really making progress. Hopefully there is some info in this message that could be helpful to some of you, or at least a ray of hope for what can happen.
