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.

Pemberley - that is GREAT news!!! I am so happy that the school is finally working with your dd to find AT solutions!!!

I'm also glad you posted the apps - it's good to hear what is working best for other students. I hadn't heard of VoiceDream before, so I'm going to check it out for my younger dd.

I hadn't heard of iSpeech either - is that a separate app or is it the built-in iPad speech recognition?

Thanks for sharing the update with us!

polarbear

Wow! Fantastic.

It's interesting that the Dragon app did better than the software. Things must be changing-- I had heard that the software was superior. This opens up lots of possibilities!

Congratulations on getting some needs met!

DeeDee

In case it is helpful to someone here I thought I would post an excerpt from this week's update on how AT is being used for DD9. Please post to let me know if this info is helpful so I know whether or not to keep updating. Thanks.

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DD was able to listen to an audio book of her choice using the new VoiceDream app on her ipad.

Today, she interviewed [executive director] for her writing assignment. We are doing a school newspaper and DD chose to write about [school's] history. She interviewed [executive director] about how [school] started. She had the questions written on Notability and recorded the interview. When she was ready to write her draft, she used Dragon. It worked great! For the first sentence of her news article, the only words that it did not pick up were [executive director]’s name and it wrote ‘it’ instead of ‘with’ but when she clicked on it, it suggested ‘with.’ DD was very excited that it was working better than it has in the past. Hopefully she can continue writing her draft on Dragon and then edit it using CoWriter.

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Pemb, this sounds terrific. Especially your DD's excitement. It is so much easier when the tools work properly...

It's always helpful to know which tools actually work and it's really wonderful to know that your DD Is learning and writing an article for school newspaper! I am so happy for her and for you.